Metagenomic compendium of 189,680 DNA viruses from the human gut microbiome. Nature microbiology Nayfach, S., Paez-Espino, D., Call, L., Low, S. J., Sberro, H., Ivanova, N. N., Proal, A. D., Fischbach, M. A., Bhatt, A. S., Hugenholtz, P., Kyrpides, N. C. 2021

Abstract

Bacteriophages have important roles in the ecology of the human gut microbiome but are under-represented in reference databases. To address this problem, we assembled the Metagenomic Gut Virus catalogue that comprises 189,680 viral genomes from 11,810 publicly available human stool metagenomes. Over 75% of genomes represent double-stranded DNA phages that infect members of the Bacteroidia and Clostridia classes. Based on sequence clustering we identified 54,118 candidate viral species, 92% of which were not found in existing databases. The Metagenomic Gut Virus catalogue improves detection of viruses in stool metagenomes and accounts for nearly 40% of CRISPR spacers found in human gut Bacteria and Archaea. We also produced a catalogue of 459,375 viral protein clusters to explore the functional potential of the gut virome. This revealed tens of thousands of diversity-generating retroelements, which use error-prone reverse transcription to mutate target genes and may be involved in the molecular arms race between phages and their bacterial hosts.

View details for DOI 10.1038/s41564-021-00928-6

View details for PubMedID 34168315