Viral metagenomics of combines rectal and nasal swab samples of northern elephant seals
The swab samples were stored the collected swabs at 4C in UTM transport media (Copan, USA). An aliquot of 100 ul of the UTM buffer containing nasal and rectal swabs was pooled per animal and used to extract the viral DNA using a High Pure Viral Nucleic Acid Kit (Roche, USA). 1 ul of the extracted viral DNA was used in a rolling circle amplification (RCA) reaction with a TempliPhi kit (GE Healthcare, USA) to preferentially amplify circular DNA molecules. 15 ul of viral DNA and 15 ul of the RCA product were combined and used to generate Illumina sequencing libraries with the Illumina DNA prep (M) tagmentation kit (Illumina, USA). These libraries were sequenced on an Illumina NovaSeq X plus sequencer at Psomagen Inc (USA).