Background: The number of prokaryotic genome sequences becoming available is growing steadily and is growing faster than our ability to accurately annotate them.
Metagenomics, or sequencing of the genetic material from a complete microbial community, is a promising tool to discover novel microbes and viruses. Viral metagenomes typically contain many unknown sequences. Here we describe the discovery of a previously unidentified bacteriophage present in the majority of published human fecal metagenomes, which we refer to as crAssphage. Its ~97 kbp genome is six times more abundant in publicly available metagenomes than all other known phages together; comprises up to 90% and 22% of all reads in virus-like particle (VLP)-derived metagenomes and total community metagenomes, respectively; and totals 1.68% of all human fecal metagenomic sequencing reads in the public databases. The majority of crAssphage-encoded proteins match no known sequences in the database, which is why it was not detected before. Using a new co-occurrence profiling approach, we predict a Bacteroides host for this phage, consistent with Bacteroides-related protein homologs and a unique carbohydrate-binding domain encoded in the phage genome,.
The PathoSystems Resource Integration Center (PATRIC) is the bacterial Bioinformatics Resource Center funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (https://www.patricbrc.org). PATRIC supports bioinformatic analyses of all bacteria with a special emphasis on pathogens, offering a rich comparative analysis environment that provides users with access to over 250 000 uniformly annotated and publicly available genomes with curated metadata. PATRIC offers web-based visualization and comparative analysis tools, a private workspace in which users can analyze their own data in the context of the public collections, services that streamline complex bioinformatic workflows and command-line tools for bulk data analysis. Over the past several years, as genomic and other omics-related experiments have become more cost-effective and widespread, we have observed considerable growth in the usage of and demand for easy-to-use, publicly available bioinformatic tools and services. Here we report the recent updates to the PATRIC resource, including new web-based comparative analysis tools, eight new services and the release of a command-line interface to access, query and analyze data.
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