More than 140000 virus species identified in the human gut

Gut microbiota, gut flora, or microbiome are the microorganisms including bacteria, archaea and fungi that live in the digestive tracts of humans and other animals including insects.

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The results form the basis of the highly-curated Gut Phage Database (GPD) which will be an invaluable resource for those studying bacteriophages and the role they play on regulating the health of both our gut bacteria and ourselves Viruses are the most numerous biological entities on the planet. Now researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) have identified over 140,000 viral species living in the human gut, more than half of which have never been seen before.

The paper, published (18 February 2021) in Cell, contains an analysis of over 28,000 gut microbiome samples collected in different parts of the world. The number and diversity of the viruses the researchers found was surprisingly high, and the data opens up new research avenues for understanding how viruses living in the gut affect human health.

The human gut is an incredibly biodiverse environment. In addition to bacteria, hundreds of thousands of viruses called bacteriophages, which can infect bacteria, also live in the human gut.