Gut Virome

Your digestive tract is crawling with viruses— and that's a good thing

- By Kate Graham-Shaw

VIRUSES HAVE AN UNDERSTANDABLY bad reputation. But deep in our digestive system, a lot of them are quietly working to keep us healthy. This “gut virome” is an important part of the overall microbiome—the vast collection of microbes that play a crucial role in our digestion, immunity and overall health.

“The bacterial component of the microbiome is well known,” says Tao Zuo, a microbiologist at Sun Yat-sen University in China. “But the virome we don’t really know much about.”

This is partly because viruses are so tiny; the gut virome makes up just 0.1 percent of the total microbial mass, Zuo explains. And viruses mutate quickly, making their genetic material harder to isolate for study. To get a better understanding, Zuo and his colleagues pulled together a wealth of research data to catalog how the gut virome changes with age, diet and the environment.

Their review, published in