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Researchers at North Carolina State University, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and the University of Colorado, observed an unexpected patterns in the microbial and viral communities of mice with intestinal inflammation during a study that examined the intestinal tracts of diseased and healthy mice.
Studying the community of microorganisms inhabiting animals and plants has become a major scientific focus, researchers work to tease apart various interactions of microorganisms inside the gut in order to understand how they affect health. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect and kill bacteria, they outnumber bacteria and have major effects on the trillions of bacteria living in the human intestinal tract.
Using new quantitative metagenomics techniques specifically developed to study viruses in the intestinal tract, the team of researchers compared the phage communities in healthy mice and mice that had inflamed intestinal tracts. They observed that bacterial and phage communities remained stable and comparable in healthy mice, changes in the number of specific species of bacteria led to corresponding changes in the number of their viral predators.
The viral communities in diseased mice were different from the healthy mice, the number of bacteriophages that were detectable in diseased mice dropped enormously, and the remaining few bacteriophages became very abundant. Several of these bacteriophages are known to infect disease-causing bacteria, which also increased in abundance. However, some of the bacteriophages that became more dominant during inflammation were not linked to any of the disease-causing bacteria. Inflammation or other mouse defenses may impact these bacteriophages.