Database update.

[SergeyBaikal]

Hello dear colleagues, thank you for the VirBot program. Could you please tell me how often the databases are updated? Because I've been using the program for a long time, but the databases have never been updated. It's probably time to update...

[GreyGuoweiChen]

@SergeyBaikal
Hello, and thank you very much for your support of VirBot. I’m really glad to hear that the tool has been useful and able to meet real user needs.

However, due to changes in my personal work plans and the loss of a large portion of the original negative (non‑viral) datasets, VirBot has not been actively maintained for quite some time. At the moment, there are no plans to update or rebuild the databases in the foreseeable future.

That said, VirBot was originally built on the RefSeq database, and the number of RNA virus entries in RefSeq has not changed significantly in recent years. Because of this, we still expect VirBot to maintain reasonably good and balanced performance for most use cases.

If you need a more comprehensive or up‑to‑date reference database, I would recommend combining multiple tools or resources, such as LucaProt, RdRPcatch, and others, depending on your specific application.

Thank you again for your understanding and for using VirBot.

[SergeyBaikal]

GreyGuoweiChen
Thank you for your response! I like the program because of its speed and ease of use, so I use it as a screening tool in my initial analysis. LucaProt is a serious program and is slow without a graphics processor. I haven't tried RdRPcatch, thank you for the suggestion. Additionally, VirBot also tried to find other proteins besides RdRp.