2.8 Excluded sequences – Contaminants, endogenous viruses and bacteriophages
Circoviridae and Genomoviridae contigs and a complete pneumovirus genome detected in our sequencing libraries were considered likely reagent-associated contaminants (Porter et al., 2021) and not analysed in this study. Additionally, any retrovirus and bacteriophage sequences detected in this study were not analysed. The picobirnaviruses detected here were also disregarded, since although commonly detected in mammalian faeces they contain a bacterial motif that is only detected in the viral genome of bacterial RNA viruses, consistent with their recent classification as bacteriophages (Krishnamurthy et al., 2018).