SRA

Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) is considered as a major public health problem by the World Health Organization (WHO). Despite its significant genetic diversity and the coexistence of multiple classifications, there is a limited availability of complete RSV genomes in international databases. Understanding the evolution of RSV is crucial for the development of vaccines and antiviral drugs. Next-generation sequencing (NGS) is now widely used in virology laboratories, particularly for whole genome sequencing (WGS) of respiratory viruses. This is crucial for tracking mutations, understanding virus evolution, and monitoring the spread of variants, which are essential for public health surveillance and informing treatment and vaccine strategies. The introduction of new preventive measures against Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) infections, such as the first immunization campaign with nirsevimab, a monoclonal antibody designed to protect infants against RSV, further underscores the need for enhanced genomic surveillance. Consequently, several in-house protocols and commercial kits have recently been developed to meet the growing demand of RSV genomic surveillance. This diversity in NGS protocols may lead to variations in the results obtained that need to be evaluated. As part of the French national multi-center POLYRES survey, which aims to characterize RSV breakthrough infections following nirsevimab treatment, standardized results of RSV WGS are crucial. External quality assessments (EQA) have become a critical component of laboratory medicine to ensure standardized results and enable comparison across laboratories, though no EQA results for RSV WGS have been reported to date. This report presents the individual results from the first edition of the national RSV WGS EQA 2024, involving 13 French virology laboratories. The primary objectives of this EQA are to assess the laboratories' ability to (i) generate full-length RSV consensus genome sequences, (ii) evaluate overall genome coverage and F protein coverage, and (iii) accurately identify the RSV clade and any mutations in the F protein sequence.