Viral diversity and lifecycles are poorly understood in the human gut and other body habitats. Therefore, we sequenced the viromes (metagenomes) of virus-like particles isolated from fecal samples collected from adult female monozygotic twins and their mothers at three time points over a one-year period. These datasets were compared to datasets of sequenced bacterial 16S rRNA genes and total fecal community DNA. Co-twins and their mothers share a significantly greater degree of similarity in their fecal bacterial communities than do unrelated individuals. In contrast, viromes are unique to individuals regardless of their degree of genetic relatedness. Despite remarkable interpersonal variations in viromes and their encoded functions, intrapersonal diversity is very low, with >95% of virotypes retained over the period surveyed, and with viromes dominated by a few temperate phage that exhibit remarkable genetic stability. These results indicate that a predatory viral-microbial dynamic, manifest in a number of other characterized environmental ecosystems, is notably absent in the very distal intestine.

Soil microbiota represent one of the ancient evolutionary origins of antibiotic resistance and have been proposed as a reservoir of resistance genes available for exchange with clinical pathogens. Using a high-throughput functional metagenomic approach in conjunction with a pipeline for the de-novo assembly of short-read sequence data from functional selections (termed PARFuMS), we provide evidence for recent exchange of antibiotic resistance genes between environmental bacteria and clinical pathogens. We describe multidrug-resistant soil bacteria containing resistance cassettes against five classes of antibiotics (β-lactams, aminoglycosides, amphenicols, sulfonamides, and tetracyclines) which have perfect nucleotide identity to genes from diverse human pathogens. This identity encompasses non-coding regions as well as multiple mobilization sequences, offering not only evidence of lateral exchange, but also a mechanism by which antibiotic resistance disseminates.

The proportion of the human gut bacterial community that is recalcitrant to culture remains poorly defined. In this report, we combine high-throughput anaerobic culturing techniques with gnotobiotic animal husbandry and metagenomics to show that the human fecal microbiota consists largely of taxa and predicted functions that are represented in its readily cultured members. When transplanted into gnotobiotic mice, complete and cultured communities exhibit similar colonization dynamics, biogeographical distribution, and responses to dietary perturbations. Moreover, gnotobiotic mice can be used to shape these personalized culture collections to enrich for taxa suited to specific diets. We also demonstrate that thousands of isolates from a single donor can be clonally archived and taxonomically mapped in multiwell format to create personalized microbiota collections. Retrieving components of a microbiota that have coexisted in single donors who have physiologic or disease phenotypes of interest and reuniting them in various combinations in gnotobiotic mice should facilitate preclinical studies designed to determine the degree to which tractable bacterial taxa are able to transmit donor traits or influence host biology.gut bacterial diversity | nutrient-microbe interactions | translational medicine pipeline for human microbiome E fforts to dissect the functional interactions between microbial communities and their habitats are complicated by the longstanding observation that, for many of these communities, the great majority of organisms have not been cultured in the laboratory (1). Methodological differences between culture-independent and culture-based approaches have contributed to the challenge of deriving a realistic appreciation of exactly how much discrepancy exists between the culturable components of a microbial ecosystem and total community diversity. Table S1 gives examples of these methodological differences.The largest microbial community in the human body resides in the gut: Its microbiome contains at least two orders of magnitude more genes than are found in our Homo sapiens genome (2). Culture-independent metagenomic studies of the human gut microbiota are identifying microbial taxa and genes correlated with host phenotypes, but mechanistic and experimentally demonstrated links between key community members and specific aspects of host biology are difficult to establish with these methods alone. The goals of the present study were (i) to evaluate the representation of readily cultured phylotypes in the human gut microbiota; (ii) to profile the dynamics of these cultured communities in a mammalian gut ecosystem; and (iii) to determine whether a clonally arrayed, personalized strain collection could be constructed to serve as a foundation for reassembling varying elements of a human's gut microbiota in vitro or in vivo. ResultsTo estimate the abundance of readily cultured bacterial phylotypes in the distal human gut, primers were used to amplify variable region 2 (V2) of bacterial 16S ribosomal RNA (rRN...

This paper presents standards and best practices for reporting genome sequences of uncultivated viruses.Supplementary informationThe online version of this article (doi:10.1038/nbt.4306) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Over the past decade researchers have begun to characterize viral diversity using metagenomic methods. These studies have shown that viruses, the majority of which infect bacteria (bacteriophages), are likely the most genetically diverse components of the biosphere. Here we briefly review the incipient rise of a phage biology renaissance catalyzed by recent advances in next generation sequencing. We explore how work characterizing phage diversity and their lifestyles in the gut is changing our view of ourselves as supra-organisms. Finally, we discuss how a new appreciation of phage dynamics may yield new applications for phage therapies designed to manipulate the structure and functions of our gut microbiomes.

The bacterial component of the human gut microbiota undergoes a definable program of postnatal development. Evidence is accumulating that this program is disrupted in children with severe acute malnutrition (SAM) and that their persistent gut microbiota immaturity, which is not durably repaired with current ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) interventions, is causally related to disease pathogenesis. To further characterize gut microbial community development in healthy versus malnourished infants/children, we performed a time-series metagenomic study of DNA isolated from virus-like particles (VLPs) recovered from fecal samples collected during the first 30 mo of postnatal life from eight pairs of monoand dizygotic Malawian twins concordant for healthy growth and 12 twin pairs discordant for SAM. Both members of discordant pairs were sampled just before, during, and after treatment with a peanut-based RUTF. Using Random Forests and a dataset of 17,676 viral contigs assembled from shotgun sequencing reads of VLP DNAs, we identified viruses that distinguish different stages in the assembly of the gut microbiota in the concordant healthy twin pairs. This developmental program is impaired in both members of SAM discordant pairs and not repaired with RUTF. Phage plus members of the Anelloviridae and Circoviridae families of eukaryotic viruses discriminate discordant from concordant healthy pairs. These results disclose that apparently healthy cotwins in discordant pairs have viromes associated with, although not necessarily mediators, of SAM; as such, they provide a human model for delineating normal versus perturbed postnatal acquisition and retention of the gut microbiota's viral component in populations at risk for malnutrition.assembly of the human gut DNA virome | childhood malnutrition | age/disease-discriminatory phage and eukaryotic viruses | gnotobiotic mice | epidemiology M alnutrition (undernutrition) is a leading cause of child mortality worldwide (1). Severe acute malnutrition (SAM) can manifest itself as progressive wasting (marasmus) or as a more abrupt onset syndrome characterized by generalized edema, hepatic steatosis, skin rashes and ulcerations, and anorexia (kwashiorkor). The configuration of the bacterial component of the gut microbiota of healthy infants evolves to an adult-like configuration during the first 2-3 y of life (2, 3). Normal postnatal maturation of the gut microbial community is perturbed in SAM; children with SAM living in Malawi and in Bangladesh have gut microbiota with bacterial configurations that appear younger (more immature) than the microbiota of chronologically age-matched individuals with healthy growth phenotypes (3, 4). Moreover, this immaturity is only transiently improved with current ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) interventions (3, 4). These children can be viewed as having a persistent developmental abnormality-one that affects a microbial "organ" whose key functions include the biosynthesis of vitamins and the biotransformation of dietary components into p...

SUMMARY To study how microbes establish themselves in a mammalian gut environment, we colonized germ-free mice with microbial communities from human, zebrafish and termite guts, human skin and tongue, soil, and estuarine microbial mats. Bacteria from these foreign environments colonized and persisted in the mouse gut; their capacity to metabolize dietary and host carbohydrates, and bile acids, correlated with colonization success. Co-housing mice harboring these xenomicrobiota with one another, with mice harboring native gut microbiota, and germ-free ‘bystanders’ revealed the success of particular bacterial taxa in colonizing an empty gut habitat and guts with established communities. Unanticipated patterns of ecological succession were observed; for example, a soil-derived bacterium dominated even in the presence of bacteria from other gut communities (zebrafish and termite), and human-derived bacteria colonized germ-free mice before mouse-derived organisms. This approach generalizes to address a variety of mechanistic questions about succession, including succession in the context of microbiota-directed therapeutics.

Bacterial viruses (phages) are the most abundant biological group on Earth and are more genetically diverse than their bacterial prey/ hosts. To characterize their role as agents shaping gut microbial community structure, adult germ-free mice were colonized with a consortium of 15 sequenced human bacterial symbionts, 13 of which harbored one or more predicted prophages. One member, Bacteroides cellulosilyticus WH2, was represented by a library of isogenic transposon mutants that covered 90% of its genes. Once assembled, the community was subjected to a staged phage attack with a pool of live or heat-killed virus-like particles (VLPs) purified from the fecal microbiota of five healthy humans. Shotgun sequencing of DNA from the input pooled VLP preparation plus shotgun sequencing of gut microbiota samples and purified fecal VLPs from the gnotobiotic mice revealed a reproducible nonsimultaneous pattern of attack extending over a 25-d period that involved five phages, none described previously. This system allowed us to (i) correlate increases in specific phages present in the pooled VLPs with reductions in the representation of particular bacterial taxa, (ii) provide evidence that phage resistance occurred because of ecological or epigenetic factors, (iii) track the origin of each of the five phages among the five human donors plus the extent of their genome variation between and within recipient mice, and (iv) establish the dramatic in vivo fitness advantage that a locus within a B. cellulosilyticus prophage confers upon its host. Together, these results provide a defined community-wide view of phage-bacterial host dynamics in the gut.T he human gut is home to tens of trillions of microbial cells representing all three domains of life, although most are bacteria. These organisms collaborate and compete for functional niches and physical locations (habitats). Together, they form a continuously functioning microbial metabolic "organ." The microbial diversity, interpersonal variation, and dynamism of the human gut microbiota make the task of identifying the factors that define community configurations extremely challenging.In some ecosystems, phages maintain high bacterial strain level diversity through lysis of their host strains (constant diversity dynamics model; refs 1, 2). The resulting emptied niche is filled with either an evolved resistant bacterial strain or a taxonomically closely related bacterial species. These dynamics have been observed in open marine environments (1). In contrast, a recent study of 37 healthy adults indicated that a person's fecal microbiota was remarkably stable, with 60% of bacterial strains retained over the course of 5 y (3). Stability followed a power law dynamic that when extrapolated suggests that most strains in an individual's gut community are retained for decades (3). In a metagenomic analysis of virus-like particles (VLPs) purified from the fecal microbiota of healthy adult monozygotic twins and their mothers, sampled over the course of a year, viral community structure exh...