title: iVirus: facilitating new insights in viral ecology with software and community data sets imbedded in a cyberinfrastructure.
abstract: Microbes affect nutrient and energy transformations throughout the world's ecosystems, yet they do so under viral constraints. In complex communities, viral metagenome (virome) sequencing is transforming our ability to quantify viral diversity and impacts. Although some bottlenecks, for example, few reference genomes and nonquantitative viromics, have been overcome, the void of centralized data sets and specialized tools now prevents viromics from being broadly applied to answer fundamental ecological questions. Here we present iVirus, a community resource that leverages the CyVerse cyberinfrastructure to provide access to viromic tools and data sets. The iVirus Data Commons contains both raw and processed data from 1866 samples and 73 projects derived from global ocean expeditions, as well as existing and legacy public repositories. Through the CyVerse Discovery Environment, users can interrogate these data sets using existing analytical tools (software applications known as 'Apps') for assembly, open reading frame prediction and annotation, as well as several new Apps specifically developed for analyzing viromes. Because Apps are web based and powered by CyVerse supercomputing resources, they enable scalable analyses for a broad user base. Finally, a use-case scenario documents how to apply these advances toward new data. This growing iVirus resource should help researchers utilize viromics as yet another tool to elucidate viral roles in nature.
authors.affiliation: Department of Microbiology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA.
authors.forename: Benjamin
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Bolduc
authors.affiliation: Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA.
authors.forename: Ken
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Youens-Clark
authors.affiliation: Department of Microbiology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA.
authors.forename: Simon
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-5831-5895
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Roux
authors.affiliation: Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA.
authors.forename: Bonnie L
authors.initials: BL
authors.lastname: Hurwitz
authors.affiliation: Department of Microbiology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA.|Department of Civil, Environmental and Geodetic Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA.
authors.forename: Matthew B
authors.initials: MB
authors.lastname: Sullivan
mesh_terms: D030541:Databases, Genetic; D004783:Environmental Microbiology; D020407:Internet; D054892:Metagenome; D016366:Open Reading Frames; D012984:Software; D014780:Viruses / Q000145:classification / Q000235:genetics / Q000302:isolation & purification*