RNA-seq analysis of mixed viral/host reads with salmon I did RNA-seq of mammalian cells infected with pox virus. Now, I have read files which contain both host and virus reads. I want to align the reads both to host and viral genome. I was thinking I could concatenate the host and virus genome into one file and run salmon against this concatenated genome. However, salmon recommends transcriptome file for assembly which are not available for viruses. Virus genome are available as GenBank or GFF3 format from NCBI. Is there any way I can concatenate these formats into the format that can be used by salmon? Or is there any way around to use virus genome as reference in salmon?
You provide Salmon with a transcriptome fasta... so merging the human transcriptome with the pox virus genome fasta file should work. You don't mention that in your post but the viral genome should exist as a fasta. You can extract the sequences from genbank or maybe you can find our virus here: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/genomes/virus.html

You can find the coding transcriptome at the link below in the cdna folder.
The non-coding transcriptome is in the ncrna. You should probably merge them:

ftp://ftp.ensembl.org/pub/release-95/fasta/homo_sapiens/