In silico Proficiency Test COMPARE

COMPARE (COllaborative Management Platform for detection and Analyses of [Re-] emerging and foodborne outbreaks in Europe) in silico virus proficiency test. An in silico dataset of Illumina HiSeq sequences was provided to 13 different European institutes for bioinformatics analysis towards the identification of viral pathogens in high-throughput sequence data. Comparison of the participants' analyses shows that the use of different tools, programs, and databases for bioinformatics analyses can impact the correct identification of viral sequences from a simple dataset. The identification of slightly mutated and highly divergent virus genomes has been identified as being most challenging: Furthermore, the interpretation of the results together with a fictitious case report by the participants showed that in addition to the bioinformatics analysis, the virological evaluation of the results can be important in clinical settings.