Reference Viral Database (RVDB) is developed by Arifa Khan's group at CBER, FDA for enhancing virus detection using high-throughput/next-generation sequencing (HTS/NGS) technologies. Unique features include reduction/removal of phages, misannotated, irrelevant, and non-viral sequences by manual curation. RVDB is available as Unclustered (U-) and Clustered (C-) nucleotide sequence files. The scripts and steps involved in the generation, update, and refinement of RVDB have been published ( 1, 2 ) and the assembled pipelines are available with instructions at GitHub. An automatic pipeline for non-viral annotation was implemented from U-RVDBv27.0. The Terms of use for RVDB are listed here .
The SQLite form of U-RVDB is provided using the sqlite3 module available in python, as described by GitHub. From version 15.1 and thereafter, the RVDB SQLDB is converted to SQLite to provide a flexible import format.
A proteic version of RVDB was developed by Marc Eloit’s group and is available at Institut Pasteur (RVDB-prot and RVDB-prot-HMM). The proteic RVDB may be used to complement analysis using these nucleotidic databases.
Download Current Release (v31.0, Jan 9, 2026)
Citing RVDB
Chin P, Bhavsar JD, Bosma TJ, MacDonald ML, Polson SW, Khan AS. 2025. Refinement of the Reference Viral Database (RVDB) for improving bioinformatics analysis of virus detection by high-throughput sequencing (HTS). mSphere 10:e00286-25.
Questions/Comments
If you have any questions or comments regarding RVDB nucleotidic databases, please contact Arifa Khan (Arifa.Khan@fda.hhs.gov). If you have any technical questions or comments regarding the website, please contact the Bioinformatics Core at University of Delaware help@bioinformatics.udel.edu.