Performance of Five Metagenomic Classifiers for Virus Pathogen Detection Using Respiratory Samples from a Clinical Cohort.

Viral metagenomics is increasingly applied in clinical diagnostic settings for detection of pathogenic viruses. While several benchmarking studies have been published on the use of metagenomic classifiers for abundance and diversity profiling of bacterial populations, studies on the comparative performance of the classifiers for virus pathogen detection are scarce. In this study, metagenomic data sets ( = 88) from a clinical cohort of patients with respiratory complaints were used for comparison of the performance of five taxonomic classifiers: Centrifuge, Clark, Kaiju, Kraken2, and Genome Detective.