Consensus statement: Virus taxonomy in the age of metagenomics

Although viral sequences are important in traditional taxonomy, information used for virus classification typically requires information on their biological properties, such as host range, pathogenicity and virion structure as well as genetic relationships. In his recent Consensus statement, Professor Peter Simmonds proposes sequence-only classification, enabling much of the viral diversity observed in metagenomic sequence datasets to be incorporated into official virus taxonomy.