Sensitive Detection of Viral Transcripts in Human Tumor Transcriptomes
Figure 1
Virana's approach to identifying viral transcripts in human tumors.
a) Transcriptome sequence samples are first mapped to a combined set of human and viral reference sequences in a splicing-aware fashion. b) Unmapped or discordantly mapped read pairs are further processed by assembly methods to detect novel viruses or transcript chimeras that may indicate proviral integration events. c) Reads mapping to one or more viral genomes (HITs) are analyzed in an integrated fashion by considering human homologous mapping locations and viral taxonomies. This process results in a number of homologous regions (HOR) for each viral family. HORs are represented as multiple sequence alignments incorporating a wealth of sequence information. Alignments are further enriched by taxonomic annotations and phylogenetic analyses.