Coronavirus RNA-dependent RNA polymerases produce subgenomic RNAs (sgRNAs) that encode viral structural and accessory proteins. User-friendly bioinformatic tools to detect and quantify sgRNA production are urgently needed to study the growing number of next-generation sequencing (NGS) data of SARS-CoV-2. We introduced sgDI-tector to identify and quantify sgRNA in SARS-CoV-2 NGS data. sgDI-tector allowed detection of sgRNA without initial knowledge of the transcription-regulatory sequences. We produced NGS data and successfully detected the nested set of sgRNAs with the ranking M > ORF3a > N>ORF6 > ORF7a > ORF8 > S > E>ORF7b. We also compared the level of sgRNA production with other types of viral RNA products such as defective interfering viral genomes.
Keywords: SARS-CoV-2; defective viral genomes; subgenomic RNA; user-friendly bioinformatics.
© 2022 Di Gioacchino et al.; Published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press for the RNA Society.