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

Abstract

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. 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).