Deep sequencing of muscle tissue reveals absence of viral signatures in Dermatomyositis

Aiming to elucidate the pathogenesis of DM in skeletal muscle tissue, we used an untargeted high-throughput sequencing and host depletion approach to detect possible causative viruses. Skeletal muscle tissue from juvenile and adult DM patients and non-disease controls were analyzed using an unbiased high-throughput sequencing (HTS) approach to detect viral sequences. To further increase sequencing depth, a host depletion approach was applied. We included n=22 DM patients from three different institutions between 2008-2018.