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Adding pathogens by genomic subtraction

Nature Genetics volume 40, pages 380–382 (2008)Cite this article

Two studies report the application of high-throughput sequencing technologies to discover infectious agents associated with diseased human tissues. These findings herald a breakthrough in the field of pathogen discovery.

Infectious pathogens are surmised to initiate many complex human diseases, but finding causative organisms has often proven difficult. Now, two independent studies report the application of high-throughput pyrosequencing to identify viruses in diseased human tissue. Feng et al.1 discovered a new polyomavirus in samples of Merkel cell skin carcinoma, and Palacios et al.2 identified a previously uncharacterized arenavirus associated with three transplant-related deaths. Last year, a similar approach by one of these teams established a virus as the cause of honeybee colony collapse disorder3.

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Figure 1: Computational subtraction involves interrogation of diseased human tissue by sequencing.

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  1. Laura MacConaill & Matthew Meyerson are in the Center for Cancer Genome Discovery and Department of Medical Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Department of Pathology at Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA and the Broad Institute of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA. matthew_meyerson@dfci.harvard.edu,

    Laura MacConaill & Matthew Meyerson

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  2. Matthew Meyerson
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MacConaill, L., Meyerson, M. Adding pathogens by genomic subtraction. Nat Genet 40, 380–382 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng0408-380

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