sgDI-tector: defective interfering viral genome bioinformatics for detection of coronavirus subgenomic RNAs

  1. Anastassia V. Komarova3
  1. 1Sorbonne Université, Université de Paris, Laboratoire de Physique de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL & CNRS UMR8063, 75005, Paris, France
  2. 2Institut Pasteur, Université de Paris, Hub de Bioinformatique et Biostatistique - Département Biologie Computationnelle, 75015, Paris, France
  3. 3Institut Pasteur, Université de Paris, CNRS UMR3569, Génétique Moléculaire des Virus à ARN, F-75015 Paris, France
  4. 4Institut Pasteur, Université de Paris, Laboratory of Innovative Vaccines, 75015, Paris, France
  5. 5Institut Pasteur, Pasteur-TheraVectys joined unit, 75015, Paris, France
  6. 6Computational Oncology, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York 10065, USA
  7. 7Physiology, Biophysics and Systems Biology, Weill Cornell Medicine, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York 10065, USA
  1. Corresponding authors: anastasia.komarova{at}pasteur.fr, andrea.digioacchino{at}phys.ens.fr

Abstract

Coronavirus RNA-dependent RNA polymerases produce subgenomic RNAs (sgRNAs) that encode viral structural and accessory proteins. User-friendly bioinformatic tools to detect and quantify sgRNA production are urgently needed to study the growing number of next-generation sequencing (NGS) data of SARS-CoV-2. We introduced sgDI-tector to identify and quantify sgRNA in SARS-CoV-2 NGS data. sgDI-tector allowed detection of sgRNA without initial knowledge of the transcription-regulatory sequences. We produced NGS data and successfully detected the nested set of sgRNAs with the ranking M > ORF3a > N>ORF6 > ORF7a > ORF8 > S > E>ORF7b. We also compared the level of sgRNA production with other types of viral RNA products such as defective interfering viral genomes.

Keywords

  • Received August 30, 2021.
  • Accepted December 7, 2021.

This article, published in RNA, is available under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International), as described at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.

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