Congratulations!

And for all of us looking at the microbiome…. Don’t forget the viruses! ( @connorggbamford.bsky.social I know you’ll appreciate this 😆)

So enjoyable to work with both @bkoskella.bsky.social & @dholtappels.bsky.social on this project! Which started as a brilliant idea from Britt at the Wiko, and has continued remotely since (ft also a lovely trip to Berkeley!) ☺️ yay for team science!

Overall, while specific viral taxa as signatures might be limited as highly disease or condition specific, we think there is promise for the use of existing ecological theory in predicting / explaining microbiome health when considering compositional changes in the virome 🦠

We saw that the relationship between viral and bacterial alpha diversity breaks down under dysbiosis - raising the question that could this itself be a useful signature of disturbance?

What did we find? Well, changes to virome alpha diversity accompany dysbiosis around half of the time. Shifting virome composition is a more consistent signature, with significant changes to virome beta diversity accompanying dysbiosis ~70% of the time.

We did both a qualitative analysis of author-reported metrics and a quantitative analysis of changes to virome alpha diversity. We also looked at the correlation between bacterial and viral alpha diversity across “healthy” and “dysbiosis” states.

We wanted to test the ability of measurements of viral communities to reflect signatures of microbiome health - and used a large collection of previously published data where the virome had been compared between some measure of disturbance and a control group (with absence of that disturbance)

Inspired by this brilliant review on the role of parasites in shaping the ecology and evolution of their hosts ….. we ask this question in the microbial world, where the primary parasites of bacteria are bacteriophage viruses

www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...