Viruses in the fecal microbiota of monozygotic twins and their mothers

By Alejandro Reyes, Matthew Haynes, Nicole C. Hanson, Florent E. Angly, A. Heath, Forest Rohwer, Jeffrey I. Gordon. Nature, 2010

680 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Viral diversity and life cycles are poorly understood in the human gut and other body habitats. Phages and their encoded functions may provide informative signatures of a human microbiota and of microbial community responses to various disturbances, and may indicate whether community health or dysfunction is manifest after apparent recovery from a disease or therapeutic intervention. Here we report sequencing of the viromes (metagenomes) of virus-like particles isolated from faecal samples collected from healthy adult female monozygotic twins and their mothers at three time points over a one-year period. We compared these data sets with data sets of sequenced bacterial 16S ribosomal RNA genes and total-faecal-community DNA. Co-twins and their mothers share a significantly greater degree of similarity in their faecal bacterial communities than do unrelated individuals. In contrast, viromes are unique to individuals regardless of their degree of genetic relatedness. Despite remarkable interpersonal variations in viromes and their encoded functions, intrapersonal diversity is very low, with >95% of virotypes retained over the period surveyed, and with viromes dominated by a few temperate phages that exhibit remarkable genetic stability. These results indicate that a predatory viral–microbial dynamic, manifest in a number of other characterized environmental ecosystems, is notably absent in the very distal intestine.

Subfields: Ecology, Endocrinology, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/894d772c277c1b8752724a6db17a00ee93448bd0

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Citations in the corpus

The human gut virome: inter-individual variation and dynamic response to diet. (2011, background): “A previous study showed individual distinctiveness and stability of the human virome over a year (Reyes et al. 2010).”
Targeting gut microbiota in obesity: effects of prebiotics and probiotics (2011, background): “Although many of these species are found in the majority of people, their relative abundance can vary greatly”
PHROG: families of prokaryotic virus proteins clustered using remote homology (2021, background): “Viruses infecting prokaryotes out-number eukaryotic viruses in some ecosystems (3) and represent the great majority of the viruses found in viral metagenomes (4).”
VirFinder: a novel k-mer based tool for identifying viral sequences from assembled metagenomic data (2017, result): “Our analysis reveals viral contigs that appear to be quite specific to particular patients, consistent with the patterns of “ personalized ” microbiomes observed at the prokaryotic and virus level in previous studies [7, 67, 68].”
Bacteriophages of the Human Gut: The "Known Unknown" of the Microbiome. (2019, methodology): “tion (Reyes et al., 2010) or lysogeny-like interaction (pseudolysogeny, carrier state interaction) with their hosts, which, despite efficient infection and replication of the phage, does not impede”
Microbial culturomics: paradigm shift in the human gut microbiome study. (2012, background): “The composition of the human gut microbiome, the determination of which represents a major challenge in the 21st century [1], has been studied with different tools, leading to increasingly complex results [2–6].”
From Animalcules to an Ecosystem: Application of Ecological Concepts to the Human Microbiome (2012, background): “Gut microbial studies of predator-prey interactions have typically focused on bacteriophages (i.e., viruses) and their effects on bacterial population structure (Reyes et al. 2010).”
The human gut virome is highly diverse, stable and individual-specific (2019, background): “, 2016) which is dominated by lysogenic bacteriophages 50 (Reyes et al., 2010), and a link between phageome and bacteriome composition has been 51 highlighted (Draper et al.”