The discovery of thousands of viral species living in the microbiome should lead to a better understanding of how intestinal biodiversity can affect health.
- Over 140,000 viruses living in the microbiome have been identified
- These bacteriophage viruses could lead to the discovery of antimicrobial treatments
It is a teeming universe that lives, moves and evolves within our intestines: more than 140,000 viral species inhabiting our microbiota have just been identified by researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the European Institute of bioinformatics. And for half of them, they were hitherto perfectly unknown! However, they seem to play a major role in our health even if we still do not know, since this discovery, how they act on our body and intervene in the diseases that can affect it.
Viruses that regulate the action of bacteria in the microbiome
A study published on February 18 in the journal Cell allows us to have a more precise vision of this biodiversity that inhabits us: it is by analyzing 28,000 intestinal microbiome samples from healthy individuals and collected in different parts of the world (28 countries) that the researchers have discovered that in addition to all the bacteria that make up this microbiome, these cohabit with hundreds of thousands of viruses. Cohabitation which, it seems, would not be very peaceful since many of these viruses -142,809 precisely have been identified- are bacteriophages, that is to say capable of infecting bacteria and therefore of regulating the action of those found in our gut.
While waiting to see more clearly on how all this intestinal life impacts our health, this work has made it possible to draw up a new catalog of viruses called Gut Phage Database. “Most of the viruses we found have DNA as their genetic material, which differentiates them from the pathogens that everyone knows, like SARS-CoV-2, which are RNA viruses”, underlines Dr. Alexandre Almeida who participated in this work.
The impact of lifestyle
Among the first lessons learned from this discovery, the fairly clear differences that were found between these communities of bacteriophages (phageomes) depending on the origin of the individuals from whom microbiota samples were collected. A clear separation between North American, European, Asian, African and South American phageomes was observed, each being associated with important differences in lifestyles.
“This high-quality, large-scale catalog will improve future studies of viral components of the microbiome and will allow ecological and evolutionary analysis of human intestinal bacteriophages, underline the authors of the study. Concretely, this should pave the way for a better understanding of the role that viruses play in our gut microbiome including the discovery of new treatments such as antimicrobials of bacteriophage origin”.
.
