First community challenge for automated virus taxonomy

There is a consensus that viruses are so diverse that no single taxonomic method can be used to classify them all (Simmonds et al. PLoS Biology 2023). Since its inception, the ICTV has been seeking the expertise and domain-specific knowledge of the global virology community to classify viruses. This has generated a patchwork of methods that, ideally, capture the features of different viral lineages and generate meaningful taxa that are in agreement with biology. These methods are formalized in taxonomy proposals (TaxoProps) written by experts and ratified by the ICTV. These documents describe how viruses within each taxon shall be classified, and include specific demarcation criteria. The TaxoProps are available as Word documents on the ICTV website. As metagenomics is rapidly expanding our view of the virosphere, we are looking to make sense of the sequences we discover. The number and diversity of sequences found in viromics datasets is staggering and make their taxonomic classification a daunting task that one would ideally approach using computational tools. There is currently no ICTV-approved method to approach this question. While the solution will likely not be trivial, we have to face this challenge to keep up with the growth of viruses that we aim to classify. The ICTV Computational Virus Taxonomy Challenge is our first attempt at assessing the different computational tools that are available for virus taxonomy.