Scientists have pinpointed a group of bacteria that consistently appear in high numbers in healthy people, suggesting that these could one day be targeted through diet or probiotics

Researchers have created a comprehensive picture of viral diversity and function in a groundwater system. They identified over 257,000 viral operational taxonomic units, i.e. viruses at species level,...

Despite being important ecological modulators of the gut microbiome, bacteriophage diversity and function remain under-characterized. We show that short-read metagenomic surveys can miss even globally highly prevalent viral family-level clusters (VFCs), that can be readily assembled and characterized with long-read metagenomic data from a relatively small cohort (n=109). While gut Bacteroidota phages have been the prevailing focus in the literature, we show that highly prevalent gut phage families frequently have Firmicutes hosts (termed GuFi phages), with broad host ranges verified using proximity-ligation (Hi-C) sequencing data. High-throughput sequencing of virus-like particles from fecal samples detected frequent enrichment of GuFi phages across samples, revealing their under-appreciated impact on the gut microbiome. We report the first in vitro induction and imaging of members of prevalent GuFi clades including the candidate orders Heliusvirales , Astravirales (VFC 2) and Suryavirales (VFC 4). Our findings underscore the importance of GuFi phages with broad host ranges in the gut microbiome, and the utility of long-read sequencing for viral discovery, paving the way for deeper insights into the role of bacteriophages in human health and disease. ### Competing Interest Statement IL is an employee of Phase Genomics. National Medical Research Council, 23-0614 National Research Foundation, NRFI09-0015 A*STAR, C210812044

On January 24, 2026, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a Minneapolis resident and American citizen wa… Keith Edwards needs your support for Alex Pretti is an American Hero

YouTube video by Jordan Jensen

Learn, Study and Research in UCC, Ireland's first 5 star university. Our tradition of independent thinking will prepare you for the world and the workplace in a vibrant, modern, green campus.

EMBL and its community are deeply saddened by the death of Peer Bork, the organisation’s Interim Director General.