Human innards are teeming with viruses that infect bacteria. What are they up to?
You’ve probably heard of the Microbiome – the hordes of bacteria and other tiny life forms that live in our guts.
Well, it turns out those bacteria have viruses that exist in and around them – with impo
There will turn out to be good phages as well as bad phages,” says Paul Bollyky, an infectious disease physician and researcher at Stanford Medicine.
But for now, it’s still not clear how many phages occupy the gut – perhaps one for each bacterial cell, or even fewer.
There are also bacteria that contain phage genes but aren’t actively producing viruses – the bacteria are just living their lives with phage DNA tagging along in their genomes.
And there are lots of phages still unidentified. Scientists call these the “dark matter” of the phageome. A big part of current phage research is to identify these viruses and their host bacteria.
The Gut Phage Database contains more than 140000 phages but that’s surely an underestimate. “Their variety is just extraordinary,” says Colin Hill, a microbiologist at University College Cork in Ireland
