Semi-artificial datasets as a resource for validation of bioinformatics pipelines for plant virus detection

In the last decade, High-Throughput Sequencing (HTS) has revolutionized biology and medicine. This technology allows the sequencing of huge amount of DNA and RNA fragments at a very low price. In medicine, HTS tests for disease diagnostics are already brought into routine practice. However, the adoption in plant health diagnostics is still limited. One of the main bottlenecks is the lack of expertise and consensus on the standardization of the data analysis. The Plant Health Bioinformatic Network (PHBN) is an Euphresco project aiming to build a community network of bioinformaticians/computational biologists working in plant health. One of the main goals of the project is to develop reference datasets that can be used for validation of bioinformatics pipelines and for standardization purposes.

Semi-artificial datasets have been created for this purpose (Datasets 1 to 10). They are composed of a “real” HTS dataset spiked with artificial viral reads. It will allow researchers to adjust ...