by Agnès E. Ricroch, Jacqueline Martin-Laffon & Marcel Kuntz. Nature Biotechnology. VOL 37. JUNE 2019. 601–621, DOI 10.1038/s41587-019-0138-7

Despite the improvement in trauma management and operative procedures, traumatic rupture of the thoracic aorta and cardiovascular penetrating injuries continue to be a source of significant mortality1. Currently, surgical suture is the only clinical method for aortic rupture and heart wound sealing but this is not feasible outside surgical units and not attempted in most emergency situations2. Though many experimental chemical agents have been tested for rapid wound sealing, such as fibrin glue, gelatin and collagen3-4. However, none of these materials are suitable for aortic and heart trauma hemostasis and sealing because of their slow hemostatic performance, poor wet tissue surface adhesion and weak or inflexible bonding mechanics.

A rigorous classification system is foundational for biology. However, viruses offer particularly problematic classification challenges. This is because in any gram of soil or milliliter of seawater there can be many millions to billions of viruses. We can only recently “see” them (using molecular methods) and they are all busy exchanging genes between each other and with their hosts in ways that paradigms suggest should undermine any genome-based taxonomy. However, we wanted to ask the question of whether simply looking at shared genes between viruses using networks could get us on the right track towards organizing the mostly unknown and unmapped viral sequence space.