Background

Identifying emerging biological threats and epidemics rapidly, particularly concerning viruses, has historically been a challenging task. The odds for mounting an effective response against a viral outbreak before significant public harm is caused are currently low. A major cause for the delay in an appropriate response is the insufficiency of current diagnostic methods to identify a viral sample accurately. Furthermore, current methods that aim to identify a single virus in a complex biological sample are limited by not being able to assess the presence of more than one viral family at a time, thus not reaching the scope of analysis that could be needed to properly identify the cause of a potential outbreak. Rapidly detecting and identifying the correct