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.
on journalism
Donald Trump was an emergency and journalism wasn't up to the task.
A must-read by journalist and journalism professor Dan Gillmor
snip
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Neutrality, objectivity — pick your journalistic norm — should not apply to these topics, not logically or morally, if we want to achieve that more perfect union and sustainable planet. Yet they remain entrenched, in too many journalistic circles, even when they are failing us.
Why? Probably because — and I’m being charitable — too many journalists can’t bring themselves to believe that these dangers are here today, or imminent, or necessarily even real.
That’s most evident when it comes to the growing threat to our republic. The people who report our news can’t, or won’t, imagine how close we may be to a tipping point that leads to the collapse of the great, unfinished American experiment in liberty.
Caution: It’s vital to take the growing threats to democracy seriously —and beware that we don’t allow our battle against the real authoritarian threat become a backdoor to a different kind of authoritarianism, the way we turned the 9/11 attacks into an years-long curbing of civil liberties at home.
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05:39 in Current Affairs, General Commentary | Permalink | Comments (0)