Discovery and Analysis of RNA Viruses in Insects

Abstract

Viruses are the most abundant pathogens on Earth infecting all cellular life forms. Only in recent years have we started to gain knowledge on insect viromes, thanks to the development of sequencing technologies. The discovery and characterization of insect viruses is important for understanding insect-virus interactions, coevolution, and insect immune defenses. We describe here a bioinformatic pipeline for the discovery of RNA viruses from insects based on RNA sequence data and the analysis of insect antiviral immune response against the discovered viruses by using small RNA sequence data.