包含14多万种病毒的人类肠道病毒群图谱公布

肠道菌群失衡会导致炎症性肠道疾病、肥胖等，但目前尚不清楚肠道中噬菌体对它们的影响。据一项发表于《细胞》的新研究，科学家利用宏基因组学（metagenomics），分析了来自世界各地共28060份的健康人体肠道微生物样本中的病毒种类，并获得了2898份从人类肠道培养出的细菌的基因组。他们发现，人类肠道中存有14多万种病毒，其中一半以上此前并未被发现。近36%的病毒有多个细菌宿主，会促进细菌间的基因交流。由这些数据构建的肠道噬菌体数据库（Gut Phage Database），包含142809个非冗余噬菌体基因组，将促进对噬菌体调节肠道细菌和对人类健康影响的研究。

Summary

Bacteriophages drive evolutionary change in bacterial communities by creating gene flow networks that fuel ecological adaptions. However, the extent of viral diversity and its prevalence in the human gut remains largely unknown. Here, we introduce the Gut Phage Database, a collection of ∼142,000 non-redundant viral genomes (>10 kb) obtained by mining a dataset of 28,060 globally distributed human gut metagenomes and 2,898 reference genomes of cultured gut bacteria. Host assignment revealed that viral diversity is highest in the Firmicutes phyla and that ∼36% of viral clusters (VCs) are not restricted to a single species, creating gene flow networks across phylogenetically distinct bacterial species. Epidemiological analysis uncovered 280 globally distributed VCs found in at least 5 continents and a highly prevalent phage clade with features reminiscent of p-crAssphage. This high-quality, large-scale catalog of phage genomes will improve future virome studies and enable ecological and evolutionary analysis of human gut bacteriophages.