Collaborative Research: Updating iVirus - the CyVerse-powered analytical toolkit for viruses of microbes

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Microbes are now recognized as fundamental to diverse ecosystem processes, including oceanic biogeochemical cycling, the seeding and maintenance of soil fertility and function, and modulating animal and plant microbiota between healthy and dysbiotic states. However, viruses that infect these microbes are increasingly recognized for strong ecosystem relevance through killing, gene flow, and metabolic reprogramming. Thus, more and more researchers ask ‘how are viruses affecting my system?’. This has led to diversity catalogs exploding and the study of virus-infected cells, or virocells, as another window into ecosystem impacts. At the root of these ecosystem- to planetary-scale advances are big data (i.e., Next Generation Sequencing) and our ability to make sense of it through scalable storage, searching, sharing, and analytical capabilities. These capabilities are enabled by cyberinfrastructures that empower biologists to handle data without expert programmatic knowledge and hardware maintenance concerns. Over the last decade, the number and complexity of microbial analysis platforms have steadily increased alongside sequencing data accumulating in public data repositories. While such platforms are broadly empowering biologists to make the most of big data, virus-focused tools are virtually non-existent across these platforms, which greatly limits virome and microbiome science. iVirus is an NSF-funded ecosystem of apps and resources that represent the go-to virus-focused analytical platform and it has been democratized through training workshops and webinars, publications, and public presentations to establish a large, active, and growing user-base. Through these venues, new capabilities needs have been identified. This award seeks to fill these needs by organizing virus sequence space to create reference genome and taxonomic resources; augmenting the predominantly double-stranded DNA virus toolkit with new tools for studying single-stranded DNA and all RNA viruses; improving analyses for studying virus-infected cells (virocells); and developing new long-read viromics analytics. The iVirus user-base will be broadened through extensive training, outreach, and iVirus web portal improvements that include feedback via a 25-person faculty advisory committee of collaborators, as well as from iVirus ‘live protocols’ via protocols.io, VERVE-NET community pages, dedicated twitter and email accounts, and a web-based comments form; training opportunities for diverse trainees directly involved in the project (6 data analytics undergraduates, 1 graduate student, 2 postdocs 4 research scientists) and the broader research community through viromics modules / webinars and a local hands-on course; and passive engagement opportunities from a new early career researcher World Viromics Webinar Series, and (ii) 2 web portals specific for technical support (the MAVERIC portal) and awareness and location for iVirus’ resources, datasets, tools/apps, and protocols (the iVirus portal). Together these efforts are expected to grow the iVirus user base to tens of thousands of researchers in virome and microbiome science, and related fields. To find iVirus online go to https://www.ivirus.us/.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.