Balance of nature: our gut is filled with viruses (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, February 23, 2021, 21:03 (1368 days ago) @ David Turell

It is all in balance between loads of viruses, many bacteriophages and oodles of bacteria:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/02/210218142739.htm

"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 today (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 there.

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"...relatively little is known about the role our gut bacteria, and the bacteriophages that infect them, play in human health and disease.

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"...these samples came mainly from healthy individuals who didn't share any specific diseases. It's fascinating to see how many unknown species live in our gut, and to try and unravel the link between them and human health."

"Among the tens of thousands of viruses discovered, a new highly prevalent clade -- a group of viruses believed to have a common ancestor -- was identified, which the authors refer to as the Gubaphage. This was found to be the second most prevalent virus clade in the human gut, after the crAssphage, which was discovered in 2014."

Comment: As with all ecosystems, in this one bacteriophages undoubtedly control bacterial population size. What this seems to mean is that viruses are not an aberrant life form but necessary to the overall balance scheme for living organisms. That tells us there are good and bad viruses just like good and bad bacteria, good and bad predator animals, and good and bad humans, all playing a role in our reality.