Department of Laboratory Medicine, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA.
Curr Opin Microbiol. 2013 Aug;16(4):468-78. doi: 10.1016/j.mib.2013.05.001. Epub 2013 May 29.
Viral pathogen discovery is of critical importance to clinical microbiology, infectious diseases, and public health. Genomic approaches for pathogen discovery, including consensus polymerase chain reaction (PCR), microarrays, and unbiased next-generation sequencing (NGS), have the capacity to comprehensively identify novel microbes present in clinical samples. Although numerous challenges remain to be addressed, including the bioinformatics analysis and interpretation of large datasets, these technologies have been successful in rapidly identifying emerging outbreak threats, screening vaccines and other biological products for microbial contamination, and discovering novel viruses associated with both acute and chronic illnesses. Downstream studies such as genome assembly, epidemiologic screening, and a culture system or animal model of infection are necessary to establish an association of a candidate pathogen with disease.
病毒病原体的发现对于临床微生物学、传染病学和公共卫生具有至关重要的意义。用于病原体发现的基因组方法，包括聚合酶链反应（PCR）、微阵列和无偏下一代测序（NGS），有能力全面鉴定临床样本中存在的新型微生物。尽管仍有许多挑战需要解决，包括生物信息学分析和解释大型数据集，这些技术已经成功地快速识别新兴的暴发威胁，筛选疫苗和其他生物制品中的微生物污染，并发现与急性和慢性疾病相关的新型病毒。下游研究，如基因组组装、流行病学筛查以及感染的培养系统或动物模型，对于建立候选病原体与疾病之间的关联是必要的。
