Since cell regulation and protein expression can be dramatically altered upon infection by viruses, studying the mechanisms by which viruses infect cells and the regulatory networks they disrupt is essential to understanding viral pathogenicity. This line of study can also lead to discoveries about the workings of host cells themselves. Computational methods are rapidly being developed to investigate viral-host interactions, and here we highlight recent methods and the insights that they have revealed so far, with a particular focus on methods that integrate different types of data. We also review the challenges of working with viruses compared with traditional cellular biology, and the limitations of current experimental and informatics methods.
Keywords: Bioinformatics; Coevolution; Databases; Host prediction; Machine learning; Network rewiring; Orthology; PPI networks; Viral evolution; Viruses; Virus–host interactions.