A call for caution in the biological interpretation of viral auxiliary metabolic genes

2025/08/27 by Cody Martin, Joanne Emerson, Joanne B. Emerson +2 · 1 voice · 2 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Environmental Science · Medicine · #Bacteriophages and microbial interactions #Viral gastroenteritis research and epidemiology #Virus-based gene therapy research

paper · doi:10.1038/s41564-025-02095-4

crossref issued 2025/08/27 · crossref published 2025/08/27 · crossref published-online 2025/08/27 · openalex publication_date 2025/08/27 · crossref created 2025/08/27 · crossref deposited 2025/09/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref indexed 2026/07/22 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/27

Citations

• Exploring the Vast Diversity of Marine Viruses
• VIBRANT: automated recovery, annotation and curation of microbial viruses, and evaluation of viral community function from genomic sequences
• DRAM for distilling microbial metabolism to automate the curation of microbiome function
• Pfam: The protein families database in 2021

Cited by

• The honey bee triad: a comprehensive catalogue of phages in the Apis mellifera gut microbiome
• Resource‐Dependent Metabolic and Biogeochemical Consequences of Viruses in Agricultural Soils

Discussions

• A timely perspective urges restraint in calling viral #AMGs from #metagenomes and introduces “auxiliary viral genes (#AVGs)” with a framework for making robust biological inferences. #Viromics #Bioinf [bsky, 4 points, 0 comments]