The respiratory virome and exacerbations in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

van Rijn, Anneloes L.; van Boheemen, Sander; Sidorov, Igor; Carbo, Ellen C.; Pappas, Nikos; Mei, Hailiang; Feltkamp, Mariet; Aanerud, Marianne; Bakke, Per; Claas, Eric C. J.; Eagan, Tomas M.; Hiemstra, Pieter S.; Kroes, Aloys C. M.; de Vries, Jutte J. C.

In the current study, most respiratory pathogens detected were RNA viruses. This is in line with previous literature [3, 5, 6] . However, it must be noted that, despite the fact that a wide range of DNA viruses have been detected with the current protocol (DNA bacteriophages with high abundance, herpes simplex virus, bocavirus, anelloviruses, CMV, KI polyomavirus [14] ), we cannot exclude suboptimal detection of some DNA viruses. Furthermore, highly divergent viruses with sequences deviating from their representative NCBI RefSeq sequences may have been missed, as has been described by others [46] . However, bioinformatic classification using alternative databases (both GenomeDetective and local databases) did not result in additional findings.