Filoviruses such as Ebola virus continue to pose a substantial health risk to humans. Advances in the sequencing and functional characterization of both pathogen and host genomes have provided a wealth of knowledge to clinicians, epidemiologists and public health responders during outbreaks of high-consequence viral disease. Here, we describe how genomics has been historically used to investigate Ebola virus disease outbreaks and how new technologies allow for rapid, large-scale data generation at the point of care. We highlight how genomics extends beyond consensus-level sequencing of the virus to include intra-host viral transcriptomics and the characterization of host responses in acute and persistently infected patients. Similar genomics techniques can also be applied to the characterization of non-human primate animal models and to known natural reservoirs of filoviruses, and metagenomic sequencing can be the key to the discovery of novel filoviruses. Finally, we outline the importance of reverse genetics systems that can swiftly characterize filoviruses as soon as their genome sequences are available.

中文翻译：

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埃博拉病毒研究中的病毒基因组学。


埃博拉病毒等丝状病毒继续对人类健康构成重大风险。病原体和宿主基因组的测序和功能表征方面的进展为临床医生、流行病学家和公共卫生应对者在严重病毒性疾病爆发期间提供了丰富的知识。在这里，我们描述了历史上如何使用基因组学来调查埃博拉病毒病的爆发，以及新技术如何在护理点快速、大规模地生成数据。我们强调基因组学如何超越病毒的共识水平测序，包括宿主内病毒转录组学以及急性和持续感染患者的宿主反应特征。类似的基因组学技术也可应用于非人类灵长类动物模型的表征和已知的丝状病毒天然储存库，而宏基因组测序可能是发现新型丝状病毒的关键。最后，我们概述了反向遗传学系统的重要性，一旦获得丝状病毒的基因组序列，该系统就可以快速表征丝状病毒。