Identification of viruses with the potential to infect human

Zheng Zhang; Zena Cai; Zhiying Tan; Congyu Lu; Gaihua Zhang; Yousong Peng

The virome which could infect humans is far from complete. Generally speaking, a new pathogen would not be identified until it caused epidemics or pandemics. Many viruses may remain undiscovered, even if they have already entered into human populations (Rosenberg 2015) . Traditional diagnostic methods such as polymerase chain reaction, immunological assays and pan-viral microarrays are limited in their ability to identify novel viruses with the potential to infect humans. Rapid development of viral metagenomic sequencing in recent years provides a powerful high-throughput and culture-independent means to identify new viruses, which leads to accumulation of new viruses at an unprecedented pace (Alavandi and Poornima 2012) . The Global Virome Project (GVP), which was proposed and initiated in the beginning of 2018, estimated that there were over 1.67 million yet-to-be-discovered viruses in animal reservoirs, and between 631,000 to 827,000 of these unknown viruses have the capacity to infect humans (Carroll, Daszak et al. 2018) . Therefore, it is in great need to develop rapid methods for identifying viruses with the potential to infect humans.