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 HIV 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