Babies tumble about with more than 200 previously unknown viral families within their intestines:
Viruses are usually associated with illness. But our bodies are full of both bacteria and viruses that constantly proliferate and interact with each other in our gastrointestinal tract. While we have known for decades that gut bacteria in young children are vital to protect them from chronic diseases later on in life, our knowledge about the many viruses found there is minimal.
A few years back, this gave University of Copenhagen professor Dennis Sandris Nielsen the idea to delve more deeply into this question. As a result, a team of researchers from COPSAC (Copenhagen Prospective Studies on Asthma in Childhood) and the Department of Food Science at UCPH, among others, spent five years studying and mapping the diaper contents of 647 healthy Danish one-year-olds.
"We found an exceptional number of unknown viruses in the faeces of these babies. Not just thousands of new virus species – but to our surprise, the viruses represented more than 200 families of yet to be described viruses. This means that, from early on in life, healthy children are tumbling about with an extreme diversity of gut viruses, which probably have a major impact on whether they develop various diseases later on in life," says Professor Dennis Sandris Nielsen of the Department of Food Science, senior author of the research paper about the study, now published in Nature Microbiology.
The researchers found and mapped a total of 10,000 viral species in the children's faeces – a number ten times larger than the number of bacterial species in the same children. These viral species are distributed across 248 different viral families, of which only 16 were previously known. The researchers named the remaining 232 unknown viral families after the children whose diapers made the study possible. As a result, new viral families include names like Sylvesterviridae, Rigmorviridae and Tristanviridae.
[...] Ninety percent of the viruses found by the researchers are bacterial viruses – known as bacteriophages. These viruses have bacteria as their hosts and do not attack the children's own cells, meaning that they do not cause disease. The hypothesis is that bacteriophages primarily serve as allies:
"We work from the assumption that bacteriophages are largely responsible for shaping bacterial communities and their function in our intestinal system. Some bacteriophages can provide their host bacterium with properties that make it more competitive by integrating its own genome into the genome of the bacterium. When this occurs, a bacteriophage can then increase a bacterium's ability to absorb e.g. various carbohydrates, thereby allowing the bacterium to metabolise more things," explains Dennis Sandris Nielsen, who continues:
[...] The remaining ten percent of viruses found in the children are eukaryotic – that is, they use human cells as hosts. These can be both friends and foes for us:
"It is thought-provoking that all children run around with 10-20 of these virus types that infect human cells. So, there is a constant viral infection taking place, which apparently doesn't make them sick. We just know very little about what's really at play. My guess is that they're important for training our immune system to recognise infections later. But it may also be that they are a risk factor for diseases that we have yet to discover," says Dennis Sandris Nielsen.
Journal Reference:
Shah, S.A., Deng, L., Thorsen, J. et al. Expanding known viral diversity in the healthy infant gut [open]. Nat Microbiol (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-023-01345-7
(Score: 4, Interesting) by istartedi on Monday April 24, @09:09PM (5 children)
This really is interesting news, hats off the the posters, because I heard it here first, and might have gone a long time without seeing this story elsewhere.
Now obviously there's a point where these infections happen, and it can't be anyplace other than in the womb at some point during gestation. To what extent is it just the mother's microbes? Does the father also maintain a constant supply, continuously infecting the mother, or doing some kind of adjunct "fertilization" early in the relationship? How much of this could be like a different kind of genetics, with genes other than the ones that are in our genome? Will future genetic testing not only test our DNA, but the DNA of our colonies?
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Monday April 24, @10:36PM
Probably just ambient microbes. I mean, viruses do outmass humans by more than 3 to 1. The entire animal kingdom combined outmasses viruses by like 10:1, but they're the only microbes we do. Bacteria, fungi, protists - any one of them outmasses all animals by a large margin. Bacteria are the most common - they outmass all animals by roughly 35:1
As for coming from the mother (or father), why would you expect that? These aren't newborns, they're a year old. Meaning they've already spent a year wandering around in a mostly-microbe world, sticking everything they can get their hands on in their mouth, presumably in an instinctive drive to inoculate themselves with a healthy, well-balanced microbiome that isn't going to collapse the first time something hostile finds its way in.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Monday April 24, @10:51PM (2 children)
Please refer back to TFS,
We aren't talking about newborns here, but, older infants, soon to be toddlers. Rugrats. Little carpet monsters. It might be better if the ages were given in months, because when people say "one-year-old" they might mean anything between 12 months and one day, up to 23 months and several days of age. Some of these kids are toddlers. So, these kids are presumably actively crawling about in their little worlds, living close to the floor, and vacuuming up anything and everything lying on the floor.
So, I disagree with you that these virii were introduced in the womb. Some of them may have been, but I would think the majority of them have been ingested and/or inhaled since birth. Some were probably introduced by way of minor wounds, such as abrasions from crawling around on that dirty old floor. Others have likely been introduced to the infant through association with other babies, and caregivers.
Crawlers and toddlers alike spend most of their waking hours searching for things to stick in their mouths! Mama's teat, a bottle, a pacifier, the family pet, and any litter they find on the floor, or higher up within reach of their short little arms.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday April 24, @10:55PM
> spent five years studying and mapping the diaper contents of 647 healthy Danish one-year-olds.
I would hate to be the research assistant(s) on that job ...
(Score: 2) by legont on Tuesday April 25, @03:44AM
Yet a few years later they are taught to wash their hands before dinner. I wonder why. I mean are both rules - every dirt into the mouth as a toddler and clean your hands presumably off bacteria at 5 - are good for human health?
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26, @12:40AM
Yo momma got so many viruses... and so do you?
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday April 24, @09:24PM
... it's aliens. BUT how about alien-human-hybrids?
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Monday April 24, @09:33PM (2 children)
It's the only way to be sure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24, @09:52PM (1 child)
Hot sauce?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Opportunist on Monday April 24, @10:06PM
Whatever works, we'll have to do a test line. Sure, that's gonna cost us some babies, but think of the valuable results!