Supporting data for "Parvovirus dark matter in the cloaca of wild birds."

With the development of viral metagenomics and next-generation sequencing technology, more and more novel parvoviruses have been identified in recent years. Including even entirely new lineages. The <i>Parvoviridae</i> family includes a different group of viruses that can infect a wide variety of animals. In this study, systematic analysis was performed to identify the dark matter (datasets that cannot be easily attributed to known viruses) of parvoviruses and to explore their genetic diversity from wild birds cloacal swab samples. We have tentatively defined this parvovirus dark matter as a highly divergent lineage in the <i>Parvoviridae </i> family. All parvoviruses showed several characteristics, including two major protein-coding genes and similar genome lengths. Moreover, we observed that the novel parvo-like viruses share similar genome organizations to most viruses in <i>Parvoviridae</i> but could not clustered with the established subfamilies in phylogenetic analysis. We also found some new members associated with the <i>Bidnaviridae</i> family, which may be derived from parvovirus. This suggests that systematic analysis of domestic and wild animal samples is necessary to explore the genetic diversity of parvoviruses and to mine for more of this potential dark matter.