A new study reveals that every person's gut virus composition is as unique as a fingerprint. The study is the first to bring together a complete database about the microbes in the human digestive tract.
The researchers analyzed the guts of healthy Westerners and showed that diversity of the microbes present during childhood and old age mirror the bacterial changes in a lifespan.
Scientists from Ohio State University have developed the Gut Virome Database in which it can identify 33,242 unique populations of viruses present in the human gut. But this discovery should not cause any alarm as most of the bacteria do not cause diseases.
The more scientists study about the viromes, a collection of viruses in the gut, the more they are seen as part of the human ecosystem. Knowing the nature of the viruses in the gut would give an in-depth understanding of the gastrointestinal symptoms caused by COVID-19.
Postdoctoral researcher in microbiology and co-author Olivier Zablocki said that characterizing the viruses that keep humans healthy will give information on how to design future therapeutics for pathogens that cannot be cured using drugs or antibiotics.
Identifying the viruses in the gut
The researchers published their study on August 24, in the journal Cell Host & Microbe. The study aims to identify the diversity of viral populations in the human guts.
Viruses in the guts are harder to find, unlike the bacteria present in the gut microbiome as they do not contain common signature genes that they bacteria have. Until now, it is referred to as the dark matter as a vast sequence space of viruses are not yet explored.
The team was able to identify 33,000 different viral populations based on the data from the 32 studies conducted ten years ago that looked into gut viruses in 1,986 healthy and sick people in 16 countries.
First author Ann Gregory said that they used machine learning on known viruses to identify unknown viruses. The analysis confirmed that there is no core group of viruses common to humans, although a few viral populations were shared in a small subset of people.
The majority of the viruses, about 97.7%, were phages or those viruses that infect bacteria. Most viruses just drift in an environment until they find a host and kill it, but Gregory said that some viruses co-exist with its host and even become beneficial to its survival.
Viral population trends in the gut
The researchers have identified a few trends during their analysis. For instance, age in Western individuals affects the diversity of viral populations in the gut, increasing from childhood to adulthood and then dropping by age 65.
The configuration matches with the gut bacterial diversity found in infants. However, since they have an underdeveloped immune system, their guts are packed with different virus types, but only a few bacteria types.
Moreover, those non-Westerners are found to have higher gut virus diversity than their counterparts in the west. Gregory noted that non-Westerners tend to lose that microbiome diversity over time as they move to the United States, implying that diet and the environment influence virome differences.
"A general rule of thumb for ecology is that higher diversity leads to a healthier ecosystem," Gregory said. The more diverse the populations of the virus and microbes in the gut, the more they are associated with a healthy individual.
It is tested true in healthy people who tend to have a higher diversity of viruses, which could imply that they are doing something beneficial to the human guts.
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