Sensitivity and specificity of viral metatranscriptomics as an arbovirus surveillance tool

The purpose of this study is to investigate the analytical sensitivity and specificity of a viral metatranscriptomic pipeline to detect RNA viruses in mosquito pools for arbovirus surveillance. To do this, a spiking experiment was designed in which two viral isolates (Ross River virus and Umatilla virus) were spiked into clarified subsamples of a pool of 100 mosquitoes and sequenced using a library preparation that included a mosquito rRNA depletion step.