


Why Are Dangerous New Viruses So Hard To Identify?

Why Are Dangerous New Viruses So Hard To Identify?

Why Are Dangerous New Viruses So Hard To Identify?

Why Are Dangerous New Viruses So Hard To Identify?

The sea of viruses as seen through the eye of a needle. Credit: Daria Sokol/MIPT Press Office.
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“There are, by various statistical estimations, over 320,000 various viruses infecting mammals,” said Kamil Khafizov, a researcher at MIPT’s Historical Genetics, Radiocarbon Analysis and Applied Physics Lab and one of the review’s authors. “But up to date, less than 1% of this vast multitude has been studied.”


“Metaphorically, we are attempting to look at a vast sea of threats through the eye of a needle,” the authors write in the review. Among other things, they explore the shortcomings of the polymerase chain reaction method. This essential technique for microorganism molecular testing fails to identify poorly explored viruses, and this constitutes one of the key problems in modern virology.


“Efficient mathematical algorithms are a key part of the method,” says Alina Matsvay, MIPT doctoral student and the review’s correspondent author. “They allow researchers to compare the genome of an unknown virus against all available references of viral genomes, and predict all of its possible characteristics, including its pathogenic potential.”



Current Trends in Diagnostics of Viral Infections of Unknown Etiology. Daniel Kiselev et al. Viruses 2020, 12(2), 211; https://doi.org/10.3390/v12020211.
