140,000 virus species found in the human gut

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 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. It is known that imbalances in our gut microbiome can contribute to diseases and complex conditions such as Inflammatory Bowel Disease, allergies and obesity. But relatively little is known about...