Trillions of Viruses Living in Your Body?!

     On February 19th the New York Times published an article called "Trillions of Viruses Live in Your Body. A.I. Is Trying to Find Them." The article shines light on how scientists are attempting to identify the trillions of viruses found within the body. Scientists estimated that only a fraction of the viruses have been identified and a vast majority of them are "benign," meaning that they are not causing damage to the body. However, they are still unsure on what benefits come from these viruses as the human virome still remains a mystery. This year, they are sending out five universities to team up to search for these unidentified viruses. They will be gathering "saliva, stool, blood, milk," and other various samples from thousands of volunteers in hopes to find new viruses to identify. This study is a contribution to their five-year effort called Human Virome Program and is being federally funded $171 million. The universities will be inspecting the samples using artificial intelligence systems hoping for better insight on influences to our health.

 The first ideology of the human virome was about over a century ago, while scientists were analyzing stool samples, they discovered viruses also known as phages that had the ability to infect bacteria inside the gut, mouth, lungs, and skin. Scientists then discovered other viruses that would infect other cells in the body without leaving any symptoms. This is also a reason why the world's population can be infected with cytomegaloviruses. During the early 2000s, a new genetic sequencing method let scientists to find more viruses in saliva, blood, and stool. The technology used during the time could detect that for each gram of stool it contained billions of phages. Biologists are very excited to go from person to person collecting stool to find new variations of the species. Similarly to the virus phages, during 1997, researchers in Japan also discovered a new virus through a patients blood called anelloviruses. They then revealed that there were 800 new species of anelloviruses. New tools and methods have been created since then in hopes that researchers will evaluate why those viruses are in our bodies and how we can use them to help us!

Links:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/health/human-virome-program.html

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5221746/

The Tree of Life

A new study has been done to show that viruses share their genes across the three super kingdoms of life – bacteria, archaea, and eukarya, and most of this sharing is typically done between the eukaryoa and bacteria kingdom. Within this new study, scientists have found that some genes exclusively share some of their genes with cells that are NOT their hosts. How? The answer is simple, they are livening within these communities but not harming them!

            A team of scientists used bioinformatics to analyze the genomes of organisms and viruses that infect them, and rather than focusing on their genetic sequence, they examined the functional components of proteins (folds) instead. Each of these folds has a unique 3D structure that performs a specific operation, and because these are so critical to the protein function, they remain stable even as the sequences change. Researchers were able to find hundreds of folds present across all the super kingdoms which suggest that they came from an ancient ancestor.  The data found also points to other, unknown, mechanisms that allow viruses to exchange genetic material with cells.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171206122423.htm

https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/the-three-domains-of-life/