70,000 unprecedented viruses found in the human gut

Scientists have identified more than 70,000 previously unknown viruses in the human gut that infect the bacteria that live there, but how they affect our bodies remains a mystery.

The “Life Science” website previously reported that the gut microbiome, or the community of microbes we carry in our digestive system, plays an important role in digesting food and regulating the immune system. But several studies have also linked imbalances in the gut microbiome to diseases such as liver disease, obesity, and allergies.

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However, little is known about the microbiome. And although it contains a variety of microorganisms, including bacteria and viruses, previous studies have mainly focused on gut bacteria for their ease of detection.

In the new study, a group of researchers used a method called metagenomics to identify viruses. This method involves analyzing all of the genetic material in the microbial community together, and then mapping the individual sequences that have been found for a particular species. They analyzed more than 28,000 gut microbiome samples from 28 countries.

This process revealed the complete genomes of more than 140,000 types of viruses living in the human gut (however, a person carries only a small portion of these types). Although many types of viruses live in the gut, they focus on viruses that can infect bacteria, called “phages”.

Lead author Luis Camarillo-Guerrero, a recent PhD student at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the UK, said researchers limited their scope to phages “because we are still discovering their role in human health. Most of them are not harmful to us and are simply an integral part of the microorganism within us. Our bodies. “

Phages can play a central role in the gut microbiome, for example by providing their bacterial hosts with beneficial characteristics and influencing how these bacteria evolve.

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“Since bacterial communities are an essential component of our gut, it’s not hard to imagine that phages could play a major role in maintaining a healthy balance in our gut,” Camarillo Guerrero said in an email. However, there are known cases in which phages have contributed to the disease, for example diphtheria (diphtheria), which is a dangerous bacterial infection, and food poisoning, a serious disease that attacks the nerves in the body, resulting from toxins produced. by phage genes.

Guerrero added that they have published the genomes of these viruses that invade bacteria in a new database they have created called “The Gut Phage Database”, which can be used to direct further studies on these viruses. He continued, “The genome is like the blueprint of an organism. The amount of information that we can extract by knowing the DNA sequence of an organism is very large.”

Source: Science Live

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