Lauber Lab
Virology

Deep exploration of the virosphere for novel viruses in humans and other eukaryotes

About this project

We have established high performance computing-based workflows that allow us to efficiently and sensitively screen unprocessed NGS data from the Sequence Read Archive (SRA) for the presence of viruses that may have been sequenced as a by-product of sequencing the host genome or transcriptome. We have a particular interest in the discovery of highly divergent novel viruses. We want to explore the human virome as a potential factor of infection susceptibility as well as a possible cause of other diseases including primary immunodeficiencies, cancer, and liver disease. For instance, we are involved in DZIF to search for associations of viruses with cryptic hepatitis. We seek to study inter-individual differences in virome composition between diseased and healthy persons. Furthermore, we extend our virus discovery approach to viruses in animals and other eukaryotes, aiming for (i) the identification of mammalian species harboring unknown relatives of human pathogenic viruses, which may form the basis for establishing new animal infection models, and (ii) the comprehensive description of virus-host co-evolution of RNA viruses across eukaryotes.

Funding

EXC 2155: RESIST, KA1-Co-02 CoViPa


Involved Labs