FYI (non-OPs) it is very likely this sample has already been diagnosed and proven positive via a PCR test. I don't know the OP, but I am pretty familiar with oncovirus studies. To be clear, my guess is that PCR positive - doesn't mean cancer.
- What I think is occurring (if I'm wrong hopefully the OP will say) - is the OP has a cancer patient(s) and has good evidence that the underlying cause is MCPyV: which is a very specific oncovirus.
- What they want to do is identify viral integration in the patient genome as evidence of oncogenesis. To put this general field in perspective I think this issue is literally the rise and fall of many investigators and companies in cancer (again not focusing on a singular virus per se but generically on the oncoviruses). Keep in mind I have an explanatory bias towards viruses.
- The molecular genetics of integration is likely to be complex.
In summary, the OP will particularly want to do (I suspect) is map the viral integration site. What is difficult is not diagnosis of the virus because at any time post-any sort of approximate assembly the genome can be locally blasted
against the reference virus and its likely to have already been PCR'd. It's getting an assembly good enough to understanding the integration site - to demonstrate integration has occurred and thats is likely difficult (but I hope I'm wrong). Inverse PCR was used for this sort of thing - but thats a wetlab approach and PCR-based strategies with traditional Sanger sequencing can still be very useful here, but its laborious but was/is a traditional approach.
Thus, I suspect the OP is from a classical virological background venturing into NGS. I noted the OP used a human reference genome hg38 in a previous post.
If thats correct then ... the big issue in my opinion is obtaining a correct assembly of the putative virus-human genome O Steps would be,
- QC
- Assembly e.g. via
bwa-mem2
... O O
- Construct a local
makeblastdb
database of the genome then ..
blastn
between the human genome and a viral query to identify the integration site
- Perform something like a
gatk
analysis to have a different perspective on the integration site via VCF
- hone in on the contig via
IGV
for optical analysis and study how the virus has integrated
O My eukaryotic genomics is outdated and the above approach is summarised in Genomics in the Cloud by Geraldine A. Van der Auwera, Brian D. O'Connor published through O'Reilly Media. I just focus on small genomes.
O O and NOTE I cannot remember if bwa-mem2
uses a reference genome e.g. hg38 type thing (Auwera and O'Connor will describe it). If it does the assembly of the integration site, in my opinion, would be compromised and alternative assembly strategies might (probably would) be required. I don't think this will be trivial - I think it would need a skilled eukaryotic bioinformatician who could be told about the biology of viral integration. Keep in mind, eukaryotic genome assembly is not my thing.
However, riches await the investigator if this can be satisfactorily solved IMO.
To answer @gringers point, Kraken2
would be useful for viral integration per se and yeah the results would be interesting because there's quite of them ... but in this case - I think - its an exact genetic sequence of a single species, thus I think direct blast-type blasting or minimap2
mapping is a better strategy than Kraken2
. Just my opinion.