T7 DNA polymerase treatment improves quantitative sequencing of both double-stranded and single-stranded DNA viruses

Abstract

Bulk microbiome, as well as virome-enriched shotgun sequencing only reveals the double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) content of a given sample, unless specific treatments are applied. However, genomes of viruses often consist of a circular single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) molecule. Pre-treatment and amplification of DNA using the multiple displacement amplifica-tion (MDA) method enables conversion of ssDNA to dsDNA, but this process can lead to over-representation of these circular ssDNA genomes. A more recent alternative permits to bypass the amplification