Research investigate the diverse viral load found in used baby diapers of one year old babies

What is in your poop? 😊

"Researchers who peeked inside the dirty diapers of 647 healthy Danish 1-year-olds made a surprising discovery: More than 200 previously unknown viral families nested within the nappies. ...

The study ... which examined the feces of babies enrolled in a long-term asthma and chronic inflammatory disease study, detailed 10,000 viral species from 248 viral families; of those families, just 16 were already known, ... Viruses were 10X more plentiful than bacterial species.

90% of the viruses were bacteriophages, which don’t cause disease but attack bacteria instead of human cells. ..."

From the abstract:

"The gut microbiome is shaped through infancy and impacts the maturation of the immune system, thus protecting against chronic disease later in life. Phages, or viruses that infect bacteria, modulate bacterial growth by lysis and lysogeny, with the latter being especially prominent in the infant gut. Viral metagenomes (viromes) are difficult to analyse because they span uncharted viral diversity, lacking marker genes and standardized detection methods. Here we systematically resolved the viral diversity in faecal viromes from 647 1-year-olds belonging to Copenhagen Prospective Studies on Asthma in Childhood 2010, an unselected Danish cohort of healthy mother–child pairs. By assembly and curation we uncovered 10,000 viral species from 248 virus family-level clades (VFCs). Most (232 VFCs) were previously unknown, belonging to the Caudoviricetes viral class. Hosts were determined for 79% of phage using clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat spacers within bacterial metagenomes from the same children. Typical Bacteroides-infecting crAssphages were outnumbered by undescribed phage families infecting Clostridiales and Bifidobacterium. Phage lifestyles were conserved at the viral family level, with 33 virulent and 118 temperate phage families. Virulent phages were more abundant, while temperate ones were more prevalent and diverse. Together, the viral families found in this study expand existing phage taxonomy and provide a resource aiding future infant gut virome research."

Global Health NOW: Malaria’s Bad News/Good News; Public Health School Rankings; and Dirty Diapers Redefine ‘Viral Load’

Expanding known viral diversity in the healthy infant gut (open access)

Fig. 1: An atlas of infant gut DNA virus diversity