Expanding the size limit of RNA viruses: Evidence of a novel divergent nidovirus in California sea hare, with a ~35.9 kb virus genome

Humberto J Debat

californica DNA harboring such element, or potential AcNV like endogenous viral elements EVEs (Katzourakis & Gifford, 2010) . Further, the complete raw DNA reads used to generate the A. californica genome were explored in detail (Bioproject PRJNA13635), to rule out that the AcNV sequence could correspond to an unassembled region of the A. californica genome. In this direction, MEGABLAST of the raw DNA reads (E-value >1e-1) with AcNV resulted in no significant hits to the virus sequence. In sum, these data are in concordance with the proposal . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It . https://doi.org/10.1101/307678 doi: bioRxiv preprint that the detected AcNV RNA sequence is, in fact, evidence of a bona fide extant virus associated to A. californica.