Transmission electron micrograph of a novel phage isolated from E. coli retrieved from a woman's bladder. The structure of its tail suggests it belongs to the family Myoviridae.ANDREA GARRETTOResident viruses of the body can affect the structure and behavior of the microbiome, yet scientists know little about the phages—those viruses that infect bacteria—that live in many areas of the body. Now, researchers have shown that bacteriophages that integrate into bacterial genomes are more abundant than bacteria themselves in the human bladder. The study was published Monday (January 29) in the Journal of Bacteriology.
“Because virome studies are much more difficult to do, we know a lot less about our virus inhabitants and how they are associated with health and disease,” says Chloe James, a medical microbiologist at the University of Salford in Manchester, U.K., who did not participate in the work. “It is really important to do these studies to start to fill in the gaps in our knowledge,” she adds.
This study began when computational biologist Catherine Putonti of Loyola University, Chicago, was helping colleagues at Loyola University Medical Center make sense of sequencing data from bacteria collected from the bladders of 181 female patients with and without urinary problems. That’s when she noticed there were “a lot of viruses,” she tells The Scientist. Putonti and her ...
