Metavisitor, a suite of Galaxy tools for simple and rapid detection and discovery of viruses in deep sequence data

We present user-friendly and adaptable software to provide biologists, clinical researchers and possibly diagnostic clinicians with the ability to robustly detect and reconstruct viral genomes from complex deep sequence datasets. A set of modular bioinformatic tools and workflows was implemented as the Metavisitor package in the Galaxy framework. Using the graphical Galaxy workflow editor, users with minimal computational skills can use existing Metavisitor workflows or adapt them to suit specific needs by adding or modifying analysis modules. Metavisitor can be used on our Mississippi server, or can be installed on any Galaxy server instance and a pre-configured Metavisitor server image is provided. Metavisitor works with DNA, RNA or small RNA sequencing data over a range of read lengths and can use a combination of de novo and guided approaches to assemble genomes from sequencing reads. We show that the software has the potential for quick diagnosis as well as discovery of viruses from a vast array of organisms. Importantly, we provide here executable Metavisitor use cases, which increase the accessibility and transparency of the software, ultimately enabling biologists or clinicians to focus on biological or medical questions.