Viral associations with kidney disease diagnosis and altered kidney metatranscriptome by kidney function.

Common causes of nephrotic syndrome are known to have immune or autoimmune components and are treated with immunosuppression. However, for many of these kidney diseases, the initiating pathogenic event remains unknown. Recently, the combined use of next-generation sequencing and pathogen searching algorithms has identified infectious causes for chronic diseases of unknown etiology.1 RNA sequencing data from tissue extractions contain both human RNAs (transcriptome) and nonhuman RNAs from infecting pathogens or commensal organisms (metatranscriptome).