So Nakagawa
Artem Babaian
Simon Roux
Uri Neri- 1Department of Molecular Life Science, Tokai University School of Medicine, Isehara, Kanagawa, Japan
- 2Division of Omics Sciences, Institute of Medical Sciences, Tokai University, Isehara, Kanagawa, Japan
- 3Division of Interdisciplinary Merging of Health Research, Micro/Nano Technology Center, Tokai University, Hiratsuka, Kanagawa, Japan
- 4The Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
- 5The Donnelly Centre for Cellular & Biomolecular Research, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
- 6U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, United States
Editorial on the Research Topic
Proceedings of the first RdRp Summit
This Research Topic, “Proceedings of the first RdRp Summit”, was compiled by inviting contributions from participants of the first RdRp Summit related to RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) of RNA viruses, along with researchers across this field. RdRp is an essential enzyme for RNA virus replication and serves as a hallmark for identifying and analyzing RNA viruses using metatranscriptomic (untargeted RNA sequencing) data. Given the extensive genetic diversity of RNA viruses, RdRp-guided RNA virus discovery has become the primary strategy for exploring the uncharted “dark virosphere”.
The RdRp Summit was launched to bring together experts in this rapidly growing field. The first meeting was held on 22–23 May 2023 in Valencia, Spain. Conducted in a hybrid format with both in-person attendance and online streaming, the meeting attracted 91 participants. The core discussions and outcomes of the first RdRp Summit are documented in detail in this Research Topic by Charon et al.
In this Research Topic, Sakaguchi et al. present a major update to the NeoRdRp database. NeoRdRp is a curated reference framework designed to improve the discovery and annotation of RNA viruses using RdRp annotation and sequence data, including hidden Markov model (HMM) profiles. Compared to earlier versions, NeoRdRp has significantly grown, expanding from 1,182 to 19,394 RdRp HMM profiles, derived from 12,502 and 557,197 amino acid sequences, respectively. This major enhancement enables the detection of a much broader range of RdRp-containing sequences than was previously possible.
Tahzima et al. explore the intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) of RdRps. By integrating biophysical insights with advanced deep learning algorithms, such as AlphaFold2 (AF2), they demonstrate the potential to efficiently estimate the conformational diversity and folding dynamics of RdRps. Their study and surveys suggest that prioritizing structural dynamics, including IDRs, over primary amino acid sequences may provide a framework for improving the discovery of highly divergent RdRps.
Following the success of the first meeting, the second RdRp Summit was held on 11–12 May 2025 in Lisbon, Portugal. Two years had passed since the first meeting, and numerous studies and projects conducted during these two years were presented and discussed, along with remaining challenges in the field (1). We hope that the articles collected in this Research Topic will further catalyze the growth of this exciting and rapidly evolving field of research.
Author contributions
SN: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. AB: Writing – review & editing. SR: Writing – review & editing. UN: Writing – review & editing.
Acknowledgments
We thank Dr. Shoichi Sakaguchi for verifying the statistical information of the 1st RdRp Summit.
Conflict of interest
The author(s) declared that this work was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
The first RdRp Summit was financially supported by Frontiers in Virology, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the European Virus Bioinformatics Center.
The author SN declared that they were an editorial board member of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision.
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Reference
Keywords: metatranscripomics, RNA virus, RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, science community, virome
Citation: Nakagawa S, Babaian A, Roux S and Neri U (2026) Editorial: Proceedings of the first RdRp Summit. Front. Virol. 6:1784809. doi: 10.3389/fviro.2026.1784809
Received: 10 January 2026; Accepted: 26 January 2026;
Published: 04 February 2026.
Edited by:
Kei Sato, The University of Tokyo, JapanReviewed by:
Mahan Ghafari, University of Oxford, United KingdomJunna Kawasaki, Chiba University, Japan
Copyright © 2026 Nakagawa, Babaian, Roux and Neri. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: So Nakagawa, c29AdG9rYWkuYWMuanA=