FLICKR, NICOLAS RAYMONDFecal samples from people in the United States, Europe, and Asia have revealed a new type of gut bacteriophage, called crAssphage, which infects Bacteroides, microbes linked to obesity and diabetes, according to a study published last week (July 24) in Nature Communications. The previously unknown virus may be among the most abundant in the human gut, and could impact one’s weight as a result of its effects on host bacteria.
“We suspect this virus is very important in regulating the number of these bacteria [the Bacteroides] in the intestine,” lead author Robert Edwards, a computational biologist at San Diego State University, told NPR’s Goats and Soda. “We’ve basically found it in every population we’ve looked at. If we tested Africans, we think we’d find it in them, too.”
Metagenomic surveys have suggested that the human body is home to thousands of viral species. Delving into sequencing data from the Human Microbiome Project, Edwards and his colleagues identified a couple of particularly common viral genes. After piecing together the entire crAssphage viral genome, they searched for the virus in new fecal samples collected from 466 participants in Europe, Korea, and Japan, and found it in 75 ...
