Identification of a Pangolin Niche for a 2019-nCoV-like Coronavirus via an Extensive Meta-metagenomic Search

Lamia Wahba; Nimit Jain; Andrew Z. Fire; Massa J. Shoura; Karen L. Artiles; Matthew J. McCoy; Dae-Eun Jeong

Introduction: 36 In the early years of nucleic acids sequencing, aggregation of the majority of published 37 DNA and RNA sequences into public sequence databases greatly aided biological hypothesis 38 generation and discovery. Search tools capable of interrogating the ever-expanding databases 39 were facilitated by creative algorithm development and software engineering, and by the ever- experiments on a terabyte scale, along with software able to search for similarity to a query 53 sequence. We find that neither of these aspects of meta-metagenomic searches is infeasible 54 with current data transfer and processing speeds. In this communication, we report the 55 results of searching the recently-described 2019-nCoV coronavirus sequence through a set of 56 metagenomic datasets with the tag "virome". alignments were carried out with standard consumer-grade computers.