Impact of antibiotic perturbation on intestinal viral communities in mice

Abstract

Viruses and bacteriophages have a strong impact on intestinal barrier function and the composition and functional properties of commensal bacterial communities. To improve our understanding of the role of the enteric intestinal virome, we longitudinally characterized the virome in fecal samples from wild-type (WT) C57BL/6J and knock-out (KO) NOD2 mice in response to an antibiotic perturbation. Sequencing of viral-like-particles (VLPs) demonstrated both a high diversity and high inter-individual variation of the murine gut virome composed of eukaryotic viruses and bacteriophages. Antibiotics also had a significant impact on the gut murine virome causing a delayed resilience independent of genotype. However, compositional shifts in the virome and bacteriome were highly correlated, suggesting that the loss of specific phages may contribute to a dysregulation of the bacterial community composition. Bacteriophage species may be playing an important role in either upregulating or downregulating the bacterial community, and restoring a healthy virome may therefore be a central goal of microbiota-targeted therapies.