San Diego State University, Department of Biology, San Diego, CA, USA.
Virulence. 2010 Jul-Aug;1(4):309-13. doi: 10.4161/viru.1.4.12071.
Cystic fibrosis (CF) is a fatal genetic disorder hallmarked by chronic and persistent microbial infections of the lungs and airways. Much attention has been paid to describing microbial communities and microbial pathogenesis in CF, however, viral communities have been largely ignored. We recently published a metagenomic study characterizing viral communities in the sputum of CF and Non-CF individuals for the first time. There was a striking difference in metabolic functions encoded by phage in CF versus Non-CF individuals. Regardless of which viral taxa were present, CF-associated phage shared a common core metabolism that reflected the disease state and aberrant airway physiology. Here, this finding is discussed further and its implications for the role of phage and the nature of phage-microbe interactions in the CF airway are explored.
囊性纤维化（CF）是一种致命的遗传性疾病，其特征是肺部和气道的慢性和持续性微生物感染。人们已经非常关注 CF 中微生物群落和微生物发病机制的描述，然而，病毒群落在很大程度上被忽视了。我们最近发表了一项宏基因组研究，首次描述了 CF 和非 CF 个体痰液中的病毒群落。CF 个体和非 CF 个体中噬菌体编码的代谢功能有显著差异。无论存在哪种病毒分类群，与 CF 相关的噬菌体都具有共同的核心代谢，反映了疾病状态和异常的气道生理学。在这里，进一步讨论了这一发现，并探讨了噬菌体在 CF 气道中的作用及其与微生物相互作用的性质。
