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Exploring the Diversity of the Human Blood Virome.

ABSTRACT: Metagenomics is greatly improving our ability to discover new viruses, as well as their possible associations with disease. However, metagenomics has also changed our understanding of viruses in general. The vast expansion of currently known viral diversity has revealed a large fraction of non-pathogenic viruses, and offers a new perspective in which viruses function as important components of many ecosystems. In this vein, studies of the human blood virome are often motivated by the search for new viral diseases, especially those associated with blood transfusions. However, these studies have revealed the common presence of apparently non-pathogenic viruses in blood, particularly human anelloviruses and, to a lower extent, human pegiviruses (HPgV). To shed light on the diversity of the human blood virome, we subjected pooled plasma samples from 587 healthy donors in Spain to a viral enrichment protocol, followed by massive parallel sequencing. This showed that anelloviruses were clearly the major component of the blood virome and showed remarkable diversity. In total, we assembled 332 complete or near-complete anellovirus genomes, 50 of which could be considered new species. HPgV was much less frequent, but we, nevertheless, recovered 17 different isolates that we subsequently used for characterizing the diversity of this virus. In-depth investigation of the human blood virome should help to elucidate the ecology of these viruses, and to unveil potentially associated diseases.

SUBMITTER: Cebria-Mendoza M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8621239 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:The South American continent presents a great diversity of biomes, whose ecosystems are constantly threatened by the expansion of human activity. The emergence and re-emergence of viral populations with impact on the human population and ecosystem have shown increases in the last decades. In deference to the growing accumulation of genomic data, we explore the potential of South American-related public databases to detect signals that contribute to virosphere research. Therefore, our study aims to investigate public databases with emphasis on the surveillance of viruses with medical and ecological relevance. Herein, we profiled 120 "sequence read archives" metagenomes from 19 independent projects from the last decade. In a coarse view, our analyses identified only 0.38% of the total number of sequences from viruses, showing a higher proportion of RNA viruses. The metagenomes with the most important viral sequences in the analyzed environmental models were 1) aquatic samples from the Amazon River, 2) sewage from Brasilia, and 3) soil from the state of São Paulo, while the models of animal transmission were detected in mosquitoes from Rio Janeiro and Bats from Amazonia. Also, the classification of viral signals into operational taxonomic units (OTUs) (family) allowed us to infer from metadata a probable host range in the virome detected in each sample analyzed. Further, several motifs and viral sequences are related to specific viruses with emergence potential from Togaviridae, Arenaviridae, and Flaviviridae families. In this context, the exploration of public databases allowed us to evaluate the scope and informative capacity of sequences from third-party public databases and to detect signals related to viruses of clinical or environmental importance, which allowed us to infer traits associated with probable transmission routes or signals of ecological disequilibrium. The evaluation of our results showed that in most cases the size and type of the reference database, the percentage of guanine-cytosine (GC), and the length of the query sequences greatly influence the taxonomic classification of the sequences. In sum, our findings describe how the exploration of public genomic data can be exploited as an approach for epidemiological surveillance and the understanding of the virosphere.

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Exploring the Diversity of the Human Blood Virome.

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