crAssphage – an ancient virus
|July 25, 2014||Posted by DLH under Biology, Cell biology, Genomics, Intelligent Design|
Are you what you eat? Or what’s eating you?
Novel virus discovered in half the world’s population
A new study led by researchers at San Diego State University has found that more than half the world’s population is host to a newly described virus, named crAssphage, which infects one of the most common types of gut bacteria, Bacteroidetes. This phylum of bacteria is thought to be connected with obesity, diabetes and other gut-related diseases. . . .It’s unknown how the virus is transmitted, but the fact that it was not found in very young infants’ fecal samples suggests that it is not passed along maternally, but acquired during childhood. The makeup of the viral DNA suggests that it’s circular in structure. Further laboratory work has confirmed that the viral DNA is a singular entity, but it’s proven difficult to isolate. . . .
Some of the proteins in crAssphage’s DNA are similar to those found in other well-described viruses. That allowed Edwards’ team to determine that their novel virus is one known as a bacteriophage, which infects and replicates inside bacteria—and using innovative bioinformatic techniques, they predicted that this particular bacteriophage proliferates by infecting a common phylum of gut bacteria known as Bacteriodetes.
Bacteriodetes bacteria live toward the end of the intestinal tract, and they are suspected to play a major role in the link between gut bacteria and obesity. What role crAssphage plays in this process will be a target of future research.. . .
A highly abundant bacteriophage discovered in the unknown sequences of human faecal metagenomes
Nature Communications 5, Article number: 4498 doi:10.1038/ncomms5498 Published 24 July 2014
Here we describe the discovery of a previously unidentified bacteriophage present in the majority of published human faecal metagenomes, which we refer to as crAssphage. Its ~97 kbp genome is six times more abundant in publicly available metagenomes than all other known phages together; it comprises up to 90% and 22% of all reads in virus-like particle (VLP)-derived metagenomes and total community metagenomes, respectively; and it totals 1.68% of all human faecal metagenomic sequencing reads in the public databases.
Or are you what you think?
Or were you were designed that way?