Crassphage

Rob Edwards, and I'm an associate professor in computer science at San Diego State University We're a bioinformatics lab and so we work closely with people in the biology department they generate a lot of data we take that data and we use high-performance computing and we analyze the data to try and solve some of the problems that they're coming up with. As part of a a nationwide project the National Institutes of Health have been collecting samples from different people and to really understand what bacteria are and what a microbiome is that's all of the bacteria that we have on and in our bodies as part of our study we identified a new virus that's about 10 times larger than *** and it's in about 50 to 75 percent of the population it's a virus that specifically attacks bacteria so we call those bacteriophage or just phage for short. So this virus is targeting a bacteria called Bacteroidetes And these bacteria are really interesting because they've been implicated in a lot of health issues things like obesity and diabetes are really being dramatically affected by the bacteria in the intestines in ways that we aren't yet sure about. We're still trying to uncover what they're doing We named it crAssphage because we developed a computational tool called crAss across assembly analysis. We identified that this phage is in different samples at different concentrations in each sample so we put all those DNA sequences together in one bucket and analyzed those as a group and that's when this genome really came popping out at us once we had identified the virus computationally we actually teamed up with the biology department and worked to identify the virus in fecal samples and also to test our ideas, our hypotheses that this is a single virus, a single genome that we can amplify My name is John Mokili my area of research and indeed my area of expertise is in virus discovery my role was to try to confirm that what they found bioinformatically was actually was actually in the sample. We were able to amplify the DNA from the original sample and then we're able to confirm that what they found by computer methods was actually the virus that was present in the actual sample. So the match was quite remarkable almost 100 percent similarity as far as we can tell it's as old as humans are It's very widespread. It's in every continent that we've looked at and we know that the bacteria that the virus is associated with have been with us for a very long time. We have no idea how it's transmitted Presumably we acquire it from our mothers or maybe our friends or other people around us. At this stage we don't know if there is any health implication about finding this crAssphage. One thing we know that this virus is very abundant every other person has the virus in his body and so we're really curious about what this phage is doing to the Bacteroidetes so that's something that we're going to focus in our future studies to try and understand really how this phage is interacting with Bacteroidetes and what those interactions mean for us depending on how much of the phage in the bacteria we have Discovering a virus is very important particularly for viruses that are harmful And then you start thinking about hey how can you generate the antibody against different possible destroyers and you can even start thinking about how can you design a vaccine to protect individuals against that particular virus. In the future we're heading to personalize phage medicine and the idea there is that we can take your phage we can isolate your phage and we can manipulate that and then we could give that back to you and this could be a really novel way to develop therapeutics for things like diabetes for other intestinal diseases like Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis that are really debilitating and important diseases that we know are caused by bacteria and we need to figure out solutions for