Finding 54,118 species of viruses in stool samples from 11,810 people. 92% of the viruses are unique to science.
from Nature Microbiology ( no - I didn't read the full paper.. just the abstract and discussion)
Metagenomic compendium of 189,680 DNA viruses from the human gut microbiome
Stephen Nayfach, David Páez-Espino, Lee Call, Soo Jen Low, Hila Sberro, Natalia N. Ivanova, Amy D. Proal, Michael A. Fischbach, Ami S. Bhatt, Philip Hugenholtz & Nikos C. Kyrpides
Abstract
Bacteriophages have important roles in the ecology of the human gut microbiome but are under-represented in reference databases. To address this problem, we assembled the Metagenomic Gut Virus catalogue that comprises 189,680 viral genomes from 11,810 publicly available human stool metagenomes. Over 75% of genomes represent double-stranded DNA phages that infect members of the Bacteroidia and Clostridia classes. Based on sequence clustering we identified 54,118 candidate viral species, 92% of which were not found in existing databases. The Metagenomic Gut Virus catalogue improves detection of viruses in stool metagenomes and accounts for nearly 40% of CRISPR spacers found in human gut Bacteria and Archaea. We also produced a catalogue of 459,375 viral protein clusters to explore the functional potential of the gut virome. This revealed tens of thousands of diversity-generating retroelements, which use error-prone reverse transcription to mutate target genes and may be involved in the molecular arms race between phages and their bacterial hosts.
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