All general-purpose computers require the following hardware components: The actual machinery (wires, transistors, and circuits) is called hardware the instructions and data are called software. Modern computers are electronic and digital. Therefore computers can perform complex and repetitive procedures quickly, precisely and reliably. It can quickly store and retrieve large amounts of data.It can execute a prerecorded list of instructions (a program).It responds to a specific set of instructions in a well-defined manner.But make no mistake about it the viruses that have evolved with us for so many years are not only part of our past, but will play a significant role in the future of human health.A computer is a machine that can be programmed to manipulate symbols. At the current pace of research, it may be many years before phages are used routinely as anti-infective treatments. Thus, phage therapy remains heavily regulated. Unfortunately, these treatments are and will continue to be hampered by inadequate information on how phages behave in the human body and the unforeseen consequences their introduction may have on the human host. Indeed, there are recent anecdotal examples utilizing phages successfully to treat life-threatening infections from bacteria resistant to most if not all available antibiotics - a treatment known as phage therapy.
So the race is on to find those viruses in our viromes that have already figured out how to protect us from the bad guys, while leaving the good bacteria intact. They’ve already figured out how to kill bacteria. Thus, in a number of human conditions, our healthy bacteria play important roles in preventing pathogen intrusion. For example, when our healthy bacterial communities are disturbed by antibiotic use, other microbial bad guys, also called pathogens, take advantage of the opportunity to invade our body and make us sick. It may seem counterintuitive, but harming our bacteria can be harmful to our health. But it’s probably not clear at this point why anyone would believe that our virome may be helpful. Ultimately, we need to know what all these viruses in the human body are doing, and figure out whether we can take advantage of our virome to promote our health. If we don’t know what the consequences are of the constant battle between bacteria and viruses in our body, then it gets exponentially more complicated considering the battle between your bacteria and their viruses that are then shared with everyone including your spouse, your roommate, and even your dog. Researchers have shown that just living with someone will lead to rapid sharing of the viruses in your body. But we often don’t think about bacterial viruses as being easily shared. To put it simply, when it comes to where viruses live in the human body, figuring out where they don’t live is a far better question than asking where they do. Everywhere researchers have looked in the human body, viruses have been found. Viruses may inhabit all surfaces both inside and outside of the body. The bacterium ‘reads’ the genetic instructions and manufactures more viruses which destroy the bacterium when they exit the cell. This lag is due to it having taken scientists much longer to recognize the presence of a human virome, and a lack of standardized and sophisticated tools to decipher what’s actually in your virome.Ī virus called a bacteriophage infects bacteria and inserts its genetic material into the cell. The study of the human virome lags so far behind the study of bacteria that we are only just now uncovering some of their most basic features. But that assumption would be horribly wrong. One might rightly assume that if viruses are the most abundant microbes in the body, they would be the target of the majority of human microbiome studies. I am a physician-scientist studying the human microbiome by focusing on viruses, because I believe that harnessing the power of bacteria’s ultimate natural predators will teach us how to prevent and combat bacterial infections. The human body is a breeding ground for phages, and despite their abundance, we have very little insight into what all they or any of the other viruses in the body are doing. Many of these viruses infect the bacteria that live inside you and are known as bacteriophages, or phages for short. But these viruses are not the dangerous ones you commonly hear about, like those that cause the flu or the common cold, or more sinister infections like Ebola or dengue. It has been estimated that there are over 380 trillion viruses inhabiting us, a community collectively known as the human virome. Transmission electron micrograph of multiple bacteriophages attached to a bacterial cell wall.