HI-FEVER: a Nextflow pipeline for the high-throughput discovery and annotation of endogenous viral elements.

Muñoz-Baena L., Harding EF., Nino Barreat JG., Kinsella CM., Katzourakis A.

SUMMARY: Endogenous viral elements (EVEs) offer valuable insights into virus and host evolution, but their detection remains computationally and biologically challenging. We present HI-FEVER, a user-friendly Nextflow pipeline for the discovery of EVEs in eukaryotic host genomes. HI-FEVER is highly parallelizable and customizable, ensuring computational efficiency while allowing researchers to fine-tune parameters to their specific needs. Its output provides a comprehensive analysis of discovered EVEs, including detailed annotations which can provide evolutionary insights. HI-FEVER scales seamlessly to handle millions of viral protein queries across multiple host genomes on both laptops and high-performance computing nodes. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The HI-FEVER source code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/PaleovirologyLab/hi-fever. Minimal reference databases, test datasets and benchmarking results are hosted on the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/y357r. A detailed wiki is available at https://github.com/PaleovirologyLab/hi-fever/wiki, including usage instructions, parameter descriptions, and guidance on interpreting outputs. The pipeline includes a Pixi environment compatible with Conda and Apptainer containerization, and Docker images. HI-FEVER has been tested on Linux, Windows (via WSL2), and macOS (Intel and ARM64).

DOI

10.1093/bioinformatics/btaf610

Type

Journal article

Publication Date

2025-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

Volume

41

Keywords

Software, Humans, Computational Biology, Molecular Sequence Annotation, Viruses

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