Next gen sequencing reveals that Pre-XMRV-2 is part of an evolutionarily young clade and more issues with PCR amplification of MLV-related sequences

There are a load of papers I'd love to blog about right now, but have been too busy writing grants to get them up -- this one however caught my eye today -- I think we have a lot of very interesting data yet to be revealed by next-gen sequencing - this paper, in Virus Research, compares pre-XMRV-2 sequences found in both wild-mice and inbred mouse populations.  It also seems that despite the fact that the virus appears to be a polytropic non-ecotropic virus [thus can infect other wild mice], not all wild mice in the same geo area carry the virus (in this case, Germany), and phylogenetic analysis implies that the clade is evolutionarily young and wide-spread amongst M.m. domesticus.  Also interesting is that the authors, Mayer et al., demonstrate the issues involved with PCR amplifying the gag region from these mice - and the utility of high throughput deep sequencing.  If you have access to Virus Research, you can read all about it - click here for the abstract -