Healthy human beings are walking, breathing homes to a multitude of
“on-board” bacteria, and recent findings from an ongoing effort to
comprehensively describe the human “microbiome” have revealed that viruses are
also along for the ride.
by John
Tyburski
Copyright © Daily
Digest News, KPR Media, LLC. All rights reserved.
These
days, people are coming to grips with the fact that they live with untold
numbers of bacteria both on and inside their bodies. A recent report even shows that each individual’s bacterial
entourage moves in and takes residence in a short while wherever their human
hosts decide to shack up. But are viruses also part of the scene?
New
research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) at the Washington
University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, says yes, viruses are
part of the human microbiome, or collection of microorganisms living in or on
the human body. The findings represent some of the most recent accomplishments
of the Human Microbiome Project, a major NIH initiative to sequence the genomes
of the body’s bacterial residents.
“Most
everyone is familiar with the idea that a normal bacterial flora exists in the
body,” said study co-author Gregory Storch, a virologist and chief of the
Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases. “Lots of people have asked whether
there is a viral counterpart, and we haven’t had a clear answer. But now we
know there is a normal viral flora, and it’s rich and complex.”
In a study reported in the open-access journal BioMed Central Biology, Kristine
Wylie and colleagues sampled 102 healthy young adults ages 18 to 40. They took
from their volunteers nose, skin, mouth, stool, and vaginal specimens from both
men and women in roughly equal proportions (the vaginal samples coming only
from women, obviously). The researchers then assayed for viruses in the
collected samples.
At least
one virus was common to 92 percent of the volunteers. Some individuals harbored
up to 10 to 15 viruses at once.
“We were
impressed by the number of viruses we found,” said Wylie, instructor of
pediatrics. “We only sampled up to five body sites in each person and would
expect to see many more viruses if we had sampled the entire body.”
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