Dear Colleagues,

Yes, all virus genomes available in Release 19 of RefSeq (1667 viral genomes) were also included in the analysis. In fact, due to their small size (in average a few dozen Kb though some virus have genomes comparable to bacterial genomes in terms of size), viral genomes represent the great majority of genomes completely sequenced so far. On the other hand, for several reasons, annotation of viral genomes is very poor in comparison with the annotation of other organisms' genomes (which is in fact another point where our project may benefit researchers, since it is likely that the function of several viral genes will be identified during the comparisons).

Cheers,

Antonio