Discovery of Mushuviridae phages that interact with human health-related gut bacteria
Mushuvirus mushu is a temperate bacteriophage linked to human gut bacteria. I identified its genome in 1,300-year-old paleofeces, revealing near-identical sequence to modern references, highlighting its remarkable conservation across human history. In follow-up work, I characterized the entire Mushuviridae family across tens of thousands of metagenomes, uncovering their interactions with gut-associated bacteria like Faecalibacterium, Roseburia, Blautia, and others. This study showcases how computational methods can reveal bacteriophage diversity on a global scale and expand our understanding of the human gut virome.
Short bio
Piotr Rozwalak is a PhD candidate at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany. He investigates modern and ancient metagenomic data from oral and gut human microbiomes from the last 100,000 years which is useful for better understanding evolution and diversity of microbes and their viruses. Previously Piotr studied Geology and Bioinformatics at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Recently, he secured funding from the Joachim Herz and Leakey Foundations to pursue the idea of studying the Neanderthal gut microbiome using high-resolution sampling in collaboration with geoarchaeologists.
Laboratory of the speaker
Viral Ecology and Omics Group (Prof. Bas E. Dutilh), Germany
Invited by
Marianne de Paepe & Jeffrey Cornuault
