Publicaties

Metagenomic high-throughput sequencing (mHTS) is a hypothesis-free, universal pathogen detection technique for determination of the DNA/RNA sequences in a variety of sample types and infectious syndromes. mHTS is still in its early stages of translating into clinical application. To support the development, implementation and standardization of mHTS procedures for virus diagnostics, the European Society for Clinical Virology (ESCV) Network on ...

Due to the complexity of the protocols and a limited knowledge of the nature of microbial communities, simulating metagenomic sequences plays an important role in testing the performance of existing tools and data analysis methods with metagenomic data. We developed metagenomic read simulators with platform-specific (Sanger, pyrosequencing, Illumina) base-error models, and simulated metagenomes of differing community complexities. We first ...

The development of high-throughput molecular technologies and associated bioinformatics has dramatically changed the capacities of scientists to produce, handle, and analyze large amounts of genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic data. A clear example of this step-change is represented by the amount of DNA sequence data that can be now produced using next-generation sequencing (NGS) platforms. Similarly, recent improvements in protein and ...

Over the past thirty years, Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) has enabled the fields of clinical microbiology and infectious diseases to investigate the genetic context of human pathogens. Its many applications such as whole genome sequencing (WGS), transcriptomics and metagenomics have deepened our understanding of human pathogens and their infection mechanisms, thereby improving patient care. Staphylococcus aureus is a Gram-positive bacterium ...

A viral metagenomic approach using virion enrichment, random amplification and next-generation sequencing was used to investigate an undiagnosed cluster of dairy cattle presenting with high persistent fever, unresponsive to anti-microbial and anti-inflammatory treatment, diarrhoea and redness of nose and teat. Serum and whole blood samples were taken in the predicted hyperviraemic state of an animal that a few days later presented with these ...

Neonatal diarrhea in piglets may cause major losses in affected pig herds. The present study used random high-throughput RNA sequencing (metagenomic next generation sequencing, mNGS) to investigate the virome of sows from a farm with persistent neonatal piglet diarrhea in comparison to two control farms without diarrhea problems. A variety of known swine gastrointestinal viruses was detected in the control farms as well as in the problem farm ...

Metagenomics studies have accelerated the discovery of novel or divergent viruses of the honey bee. However, most of these studies predominantly focused on RNA viruses, and many suffer from the relatively low abundance of viral nucleic acids in the samples (i.e., compared to that of the host). Here, we explored the virome of the Ethiopian honey bee, Apis mellifera simensis, using an unbiased metagenomic approach in which the next-generation ...

Despite the increasing epidemiological evidence that the Onchocerca volvulus parasite is strongly associated with epilepsy in children, hence the name onchocerciasis-associated epilepsy (OAE), the pathophysiological mechanism of OAE remains to be elucidated. In June 2014, children with unprovoked convulsive epilepsy and healthy controls were enrolled in a case control study in Titule, Bas-Uele Province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo ...

Sequence Independent Single Primer Amplification is one of the most widely used random amplification approaches in virology for sequencing template preparation. This technique relies on oligonucleotides consisting of a 39 random part used to prime complementary DNA synthesis and a 59 defined tag sequence for subsequent amplification. Recently, this amplification method was combined with next generation sequencing to obtain viral sequences. ...