RNA Viral Community in Human Feces: Prevalence of Plant Pathogenic Viruses

The human gut is known to be a reservoir of a wide variety of microbes, including viruses. Many RNA viruses are known to be associated with gastroenteritis; however, the enteric RNA viral community present in healthy humans has not been described. Here, we present a comparative metagenomic analysis of the RNA viruses found in three fecal samples from two healthy human individuals. For this study, uncultured viruses were concentrated by tangential flow filtration, and viral RNA was extracted and cloned into shotgun viral cDNA libraries for sequencing analysis. The vast majority of the 36,769 viral sequences obtained were similar to plant pathogenic RNA viruses. The most abundant fecal virus in this study was…

• NS
  National Science Foundation
• UE
  U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
• AF
  Agency for Science, Technology and Research
• GI
  Genome Institute of Singapore