Kathryn L. Langenfeld

This paper identifies viral biomarkers from oral and nasal metagenomes to detect human respiratory activity in environmental samples.

The paper develops QuantMeta, a tool to quantify absolute abundances in metagenomes, and applies it to detect and measure DNA viruses in wastewater.

The paper benchmarks 63 viral identification rulesets on mock metagenomes and aquatic samples, finding that combining rules increases recall but also false positives, with some combinations achieving high accuracy.