Int J Mol Sci. 2021 Apr 16;22(8):4127. doi: 10.3390/ijms22084127.

Valerio Fulci ¹, Laura Stronati ¹, Salvatore Cucchiara ², Ilaria Laudadio ¹, Claudia Carissimi ¹

Author information

• ¹Department of Molecular Medicine, Sapienza University of Rome, 00161 Rome, Italy.
• ²Department of Women's and Children's Health, Sapienza University of Rome, 00161 Rome, Italy.

Abstract

In the last decade, the widespread application of shotgun metagenomics provided extensive characterization of the bacterial "dark matter" of the gut microbiome, propelling the development of dedicated, standardized bioinformatic pipelines and the systematic collection of metagenomic data into comprehensive databases. The advent of next-generation sequencing also unravels a previously underestimated viral population (virome) present in the human gut. Despite extensive efforts to characterize the human gut virome, to date, little is known about the childhood gut virome. However, alterations of the gut virome in children have been linked to pathological conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease, type 1 diabetes, malnutrition, diarrhea and celiac disease.