Evaluation of a commercial exogenous internal process control for diagnostic RNA virus metagenomics from different animal clinical samples.

Metagenomic next generation sequencing is increasingly recognised as an important complementary tool to targeted human and animal infectious disease diagnostics. It is, however, sensitive to biases and errors that are currently not systematically evaluated by the implementation of quality controls for the diagnostic use of mNGS. We evaluated a commercial reagent (containing Mengovirus strain vMC0) as an exogenous internal QC validating the integrity of reagents and workflow, the efficient isolation of viral nucleic acids and the absence of inhibitors in individual samples, and the efficient generation of viral sequence data in individual samples. This work was supported by funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme under grant agreement No 773830: One Health European Joint Programme as internal joint research project METASTAVA