Evaluation of viral genome assembly and diversity estimation in deep metagenomes

Background Viruses have unique properties, small genome and regions of high similarity, whose effects on metagenomic assemblies have not been characterized so far. This study uses diverse in silico simulated viromes to evaluate how extensively genomes can be assembled using different sequencing platforms and assemblers. Further, it investigates the suitability of different methods to estimate viral diversity in metagenomes.