Bee microbiomes go viral

Perhaps now more than ever (1), it is abundantly clear that viruses can rapidly and dramatically alter host populations, both by direct mortality and by changing the way hosts interact with each other. Like macroscopic organisms, bacteria also contend with their own viruses. Called bacteriophages (or simply, phages), these nanometer-scale parasites are the most numerous, yet least well-characterized, forms of “life” on the planet (2, 3). Because of their inability to directly grow phages (or most of their bacterial hosts), researchers have had only a limited view of the abundance, distribution, and population structure of phage communities. Now, a pair of studies in PNAS, by Bonilla-Rosso et al. (4) and Deboutte et al. (5), have pulled back the curtain on the phages of an emerging model microbiome system: that of the bee gut.Honey bees ( Apis mellifera ), like humans, have a uniquely specialized gut microbiome that has developed over millions of years of coevolution (6). A billion cells strong, the bacteria within each bee play significant roles in extracting dietary nutrients and fending off pathogens (7⇓⇓⇓–11). If what we know from mammalian gut microbiomes holds (12), there also exist as many phages as bacteria in the bee gut. However, to date, there has been no unbiased systematic survey of phages from bees. Both Bonilla-Rosso et al. (4) and Deboutte et al. (5) ambitiously set out to use metagenomic sequencing on viral particles purified from bees, to offer a glimpse into the diversity of phages present as well as the types of genes they carry.Bonilla-Rosso et al. (4) combined hundreds of bees from Swiss hives into two samples for analysis, whereas … [↵][1]1Email: waldankwong{at}gmail.com. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1