As an important component of human microbial flora, viruses are abundantly present in the human oral cavity, skin, lungs, gastrointestinal tract, blood and even cerebrospinal fluid. The reporter learned from the Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences on the 9th that the Computational Biology and Medical Ecology Group of the Institute used the latest results to establish a model of changes in the diversity of the human virome.
Viruses are present in almost every corner of the earth. In the human body, they exist in the form of viral communities, and the collection of these viral communities is the human virome.
"Compared to the bacteria in the intestinal flora, the number of viruses is more than 10 times that of bacteria and can reach trillions. The human virus community includes endogenous retroviruses, eukaryotic viruses that infect human cells, phages that infect bacteria, and Viruses that infect archaea." Researcher Ma Zhanshan, the leader of the subject group, said that there is co-evolution between the human virus community and the host, so there is a complex interaction.
Existing research has found that there is a close connection between the human virome and many diseases. Diseases may affect the diversity and composition of the virome; at the same time, changes in the virome will in turn affect the onset and progression of the disease. These diseases include not only viral diseases that are directly caused by viral infections, such as AIDS, Ebola hemorrhagic fever, and influenza, but also non-viral diseases such as cystic fibrosis, periodontal disease, and inflammatory bowel disease. . Recently, Xiao Wanmeng, a doctoral student in the subject group, applied the "diversity-area relationship" analysis method proposed by Ma Zhanshan to obtain for the first time the inter-individual heterogeneity of human virus community diversity, the potential diversity at the group level, and the diversity of local virus communities. sex in the global viral macrocommunity and explore the impact of disease on these parameters.
This model shows that the impact of disease on the inter-individual diversity heterogeneity of human viral communities is generally not significant. Instead, the underlying viral diversity may be significantly different between healthy controls and patients. At the same time, the above ratio parameters and the ratio parameters of the human virus community are much larger than those of the bacterial community.
The research results suggest that although the number of individual viruses in our bodies is 10 times the number of bacteria, from a group perspective, each person's contribution to global viral diversity is higher than that to bacterial diversity. The international journal Frontiers in Genetics published the findings online.
