A Previously Undescribed Highly Prevalent Phage Identified in a Danish Enteric Virome Catalog

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articlepeer-review

  • Lore Van Espen
  • Leen Beller
  • Lila Close
  • Ward Deboutte
  • Helene Bæk Juel
  • Trine Nielsen
  • Deniz Sinar
  • Lander De Coninck
  • Christine Frithioff-Bøjsøe
  • Suganya Jacobsen
  • Maria Kjærgaard
  • Maja Thiele
  • Anthony Fullam
  • Michael Kuhn
  • Peer Bork
  • Aleksander Krag
  • Jelle Matthijnssens

Gut viruses are important, yet often neglected, players in the complex human gut microbial ecosystem. Recently, the number of human gut virome studies has been increasing; however, we are still only scratching the surface of the immense viral diversity. In this study, 254 virus-enriched fecal metagenomes from 204 Danish subjects were used to generate the Danish Enteric Virome Catalog (DEVoC) containing 12,986 nonredundant viral scaffolds, of which the majority was previously undescribed, encoding 190,029 viral genes. The DEVoC was used to compare 91 healthy DEVoC gut viromes from children, adolescents, and adults that were used to create the DEVoC. Gut viromes of healthy Danish subjects were dominated by phages. While most phage genomes (PGs) only occurred in a single subject, indicating large virome individuality, 39 PGs were present in more than 10 healthy subjects. Among these 39 PGs, the prevalences of three PGs were associated with age. To further study the prevalence of these 39 prevalent PGs, 1,880 gut virome data sets of 27 studies from across the world were screened, revealing several age-, geography-, and disease-related prevalence patterns. Two PGs also showed a remarkably high prevalence worldwide-a crAss-like phage (20.6% prevalence), belonging to the tentative AlphacrAssvirinae subfamily, and a previously undescribed circular temperate phage infecting Bacteroides dorei (14.4% prevalence), called LoVEphage because it encodes lots of viral elements. Due to the LoVEphage's high prevalence and novelty, public data sets in which the LoVEphage was detected were de novo assembled, resulting in an additional 18 circular LoVEphage-like genomes (67.9 to 72.4 kb).

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere00382-21
JournalmSystems
Volume6
Issue number5
Number of pages20
ISSN2379-5077
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2021 Van Espen et al.

    Research areas

  • Healthy gut viromes, Human gut virome, Phages, Virome catalog

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