Unveiling Novel Viral Diversity, Biogeography, and Host Networks in Wildlife Through High-Throughput Sequencing Data Mining.

Publication date: Sep 23, 2025

≈75% of emerging pathogens originating from wildlife. However, viral diversity within wildlife remains insufficiently explored. This work performs an extensive analysis of 57 536 publicly high-throughput sequencing datasets from wild mammals and birds, resulting in the generation of ≈613. 45 million assembled contigs, including 131 509 potential viral contigs identified through BLASTn and BLASTx searches. Following the exclusion of index hopping contamination, 9788 are categorized into 25 viral families with known zoonotic potential. These results indicate significant spatial and host-specific variability in viral distribution and reveal a positive correlation between viral diversity and host biodiversity. Rodents, bats, ungulates, and anseriformes exhibit the highest viral diversity. Notably, 50% of the viral sequences exhibit

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