**Not yet funded**

Metagenomic and metatranscriptomic sequencing surveys have elucidated an astonishingly wide diversity of novel viruses and have expanded the putative host range of several viral families. Marine invertebrate transcriptomes (i.e. RNASeq) surveys – which are generated to study evolutionary biology and responses of hosts to perturbations – often bear a large signal from viruses (see Shi et al., 2016). The lab has commenced a new collaboration with Kevin Kocot (University of Alabama) and Ken Halanych (Auburn) to harness existing transcriptomes of phylogenetically diverse marine invertebrates to discover new viruses.