Background#R##N#Highly mutable RNA viruses exist in infected hosts as heterogeneous populations of genetically close variants known as quasispecies. Next-generation sequencing (NGS) allows for analysing a large number of viral sequences from infected patients, presenting a novel opportunity for studying the structure of a viral population and understanding virus evolution, drug resistance and immune escape. Accurate reconstruction of genetic composition of intra-host viral populations involves assembling the NGS short reads into whole-genome sequences and estimating frequencies of individual viral variants. Although a few approaches were developed for this task, accurate reconstruction of quasispecies populations remains greatly unresolved.
['Pavel Skums', 'Nicholas Mancuso', 'Alexander Artyomenko', 'Bassam Tork', 'Ion I. Mandoiu', 'Yuri Khudyakov', 'Alexander Zelikovsky']
Reconstruction of viral population structure from next-generation sequencing data using multicommodity flows