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Background: Viruses and other infectious agents cause more than 15% of human cancer cases. High-throughput sequencing-based studies of virus-cancer associations have mainly focused on cancer transcriptome data.Methods: In this study, we applied a diverse selection of presequencing enrichment methods targeting all major viral groups, to characterize the viruses present in 197 samples from 18 sample types of cancerous origin. Using high-throughput sequencing, we generated 710 datasets constituting 57 billion sequencing reads.Results: Detailed in silico investigation of the viral content, including exclusion of viral artefacts, from de novo assembled contigs and individual sequencing reads yielded a map of the viruses detected. Our data reveal a virome dominated by papillomaviruses, anelloviruses, herpesviruses, and parvoviruses. More than half of the included samples contained 1 or more viruses; however, no link between specific viruses and cancer types were found.Conclusions: Our study sheds light on viral presence in cancers and provides highly relevant virome data for future reference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]