"The scale of what's unknown within phages is enormous," says Martha Clokie at the University of Leicester, UK.
"Our virome is hugely abundant and incredibly diverse, and we've looked at just a tiny percentage," says Jeremy Barr, a phage biologist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
Researchers' knowledge of phages is biased towards those that infect harmful bacteria... Viruses that hunt the harmless commensal gut bacteria that make up the microbiome, by contrast, are much less well catalogued.
This dearth of knowledge is not owing to a lack of interest - the US National Institutes of Health has a programme dedicated to cataloguing and characterizing the viruses that live inside the human gut.
Collection
[
|
...
]