The test detects antibodies even after infection subsides, and uses them to create a blueprint of nearly every virus present in our body.

It is a dramatic alternative to existing diagnostic tools, which test only for a single suspected virus. Researcher Ian Lipkin said, "The approach is clever and a technological tour de force. It has the potential to reveal viruses people have encountered recently or many years earlier, thus, this is a powerful new research tool."
During the study, scientists found that an average person is exposed to 10 of the 206 different species of known viruses, though some people showed exposure to more than double that number. Study leader Stephen Elledge said, "Many of those people have probably been infected with many different strains of the same virus. People could be infected with many strains of rhinovirus over the course of your life, for instance, and it would show up as one hit. The VirScan analysis currently can be performed for about 25 dollars per blood sample, though labs might charge much more than that if the test becomes commercially available. It currently takes two or three days to process and sequence about 100 samples, though that speed could increase as technology improves."
The study appears in Science.
Source-Medindia