DisCVR is a user-friendly tool for detecting known viruses in clinical samples. It works by creating a viral database of k-mers (22 nucleotide sequences) from a set of known sequence. These k-mers are taxonomically labelled according to the viruses from which they originated. Each read in the sample is then screened for the presence of k-mers in the viral database, and a list of all viruses with k-mers found in the sample is shown. DisCVR accurately detects known human viruses from HTS data using computers with limited resources, and includes a graphical user interface to make the interpretation and validation of results easy. At present, DisCVR is a human viral diagnostic tool, but it can be readily extended to include non-viral human pathogens and pathogens of other hosts using the scripts provided to build customised databases.

The source code for DisCVR can be downloaded from https://github.com/centre-for-virus-research/DisCVR

Compiled versions with the built-in databases are available from http://bioinformatics.cvr.ac.uk/discvr.php The download includes information for installing and running the tool.

For more information on how to run DisCVR, here is the manual

DisCVR was developed by Maha Maabar