V- and VL-Scores Unveil Viral Signatures and Origins of Protein Families.

V-Score-Search is an online-search website for the public to search V-scores and VL-scores associated with every protein cluster or family in five widely used public databases including PHROG, VOG, KEGG, Pfam, and eggNOG. V-scores and VL-scores are quantitative metrics to serve as a virus-like signature for differentiating between viral and non-viral protein families and genomes (Figure 1). We demonstrate specific use cases of V-scores and VL-scores in virus identification, prophage discovery, annotation of host-derived and metabolic proteins on viral genomes, and virus genome binning. V-scores and VL-scores can serve as a metric to define the likelihood of protein families being detected in viruses and enable diverse applications associated with viral genomics, ecology, and evolution. For more detail on V-scores and VL-scores and how they work, please see our paper (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.10.24.619987v1).