THE HUMAN VIROME

THE VIRUSES INSIDE OF US

This year, when the novel coronavirus (COVID- 19) pandemic devastated the entire world, I was very surprised as to how little the scientific and medical community knew about it, except recommending some general protective public health measures. So much so, that this situation created a vacuum, and encouraged some politicians to ignore scientists, and advocate using bogus treatments such as injecting household disinfectants and taking some unproven Malaria medications as a cure.

I wondered why politicians could ignore scientific facts, and why the scientific world knew so little about this novel (new) virus? This situation made me much more curious about viruses in general. I started reading about viruses in textbooks, in scholarly articles and surfed the internet with the hope that I could learn and understand a little better what was going on and why?

In my readings, I discovered some new and interesting facts about viruses that I didn’t know before and in addition, I realized how immense, dynamic, complex, constantly changing the world of viruses and virology was. I thought it would be interesting to share some of my newly acquired knowledge with my   readers, using simple language for better understanding.

Let me start with a simple question: What is a virus and what is the origin of viruses?

Viruses are extremely small (much smaller than bacteria), infectious biological (alive) particles. Their origin is thought to be previously free-living microorganisms that adapted to parasitic replication strategy. They are only made of a strand of genetic material (RNA or DNA) and covered with a protein coat. They are not complete cells, they don’t have a cell wall, and they can’t replicate without invading a host’s cells and using host cells’ replicating mechanisms.

Viruses are classified according to: (1) Their shape; (2) Hosts they prefer to infect (thereby becoming animal viruses, plant viruses and bacterial viruses or bacteriophages); (3) Their genetic code (RNA or DNA viruses).

Animal viruses have an ability cross species borders by infecting other animals and circulating between species including humans. It is believed that COVID-19 crossed from bats to humans.

Biologists estimate that there are about 380 trillion of viruses living on, and inside of our body, as well as inside of our microbiome bacterial population. These viruses are called phages. Viruses are 10 times more than our microbiome population.  Viruses that establish themselves in our body are called ”the human virome.”

Just as bacterial population, viral population in the human virome also could be beneficial good viruses and some of them could be disease causing bad viruses. The scientific challenge is to identify good viruses and promote them while trying to eliminate bad, disease causing viruses.

As assumed, we are not really made up as humans, primarily by “human cells.” As much as half of biological and genetic matter is not human at all. Since viruses enter inside the host cells and use the host cells genetic machinery to replicate themselves. Certain viral genes can easily coalesce with human genes and become an integral part of the human genome. This type of gene transfer called “horizontal gene transfer” (HGT). There is also gene transfer from parents to offspring, which is called “vertical gene transfer (VGT)”. HGT is thought to be an important factor in evolution and in creation of different species. It is believed that our mitochondrial DNA origin, which only carried by females, is viral in origin.

Today, we realize that the vast human virome population in us is a part of larger human microbiome population and they colonize every corner of our body.

As we learn more about the role of viruses, we might be able to discover many therapeutic possibilities. For example, scientists from The Rockefeller University were able to purify an enzyme from a virus that kills antibiotic resistant (MRSA) bacteria. Many phages (viruses that infect bacteria) have been be purified of bacterial remnants and used against bacterial infections as effective treatment modalities and many more are in the pipeline.

Stay tuned, trust science not politicians. Scientific miracles, vaccines and future scientific wars against viruses would save our future.

I believe that 2021 will be a much better year than 2020. We learned our lesson; we are wiser and better. I wish everyone a happy, healthy and successful 2021.