Screening great ape museum specimens for DNA viruses

Natural history museum collections harbour a record of wild species from the past centuries, providing a unique opportunity to study animals as well as their infectious agents. Thousands of great ape specimens are kept in these collections, and could become an important resource to study the evolution of DNA viruses, whose genetic material is likely to be preserved in dry museum specimens. Here, we screened 209 great ape museum specimens for 99 different DNA viruses, using hybridization capture coupled with short-read high-throughput sequencing. We report a capture design for great ape DNA viruses, sequencing data obtained using this approach, as well as findings regarding the presence of viruses, and several viral genomes obtained from historical specimens.