Prophages are an important part of any microbiome, including the human microbiome. They can confer various advantages to their bacterial host that could have an effect on human health. In this study, bacterial genomes were downloaded from Genbank and analysed with Phispy to predict the presence of prophages in the genomes.
There were significant differences found in the number of prophages between different areas of the human body, with regions like the stomach containing bacteria with almost no prophages (0.4±0.8), while regions such as the mouth (2.8±2.1) and intestines (2.8±2.2) contain more prophages on average.
Disease is also a major factor that affects the composition of the microbiome and preliminary analysis from this project suggests that some diseases are associated with fewer prophages than others. For example, throat samples from healthy individuals contain significantly more prophages (3.6±1.4) than throat samples from individuals with various illnesses (2.3±1.8). When looking specifically at the different illnesses the patients had, pneumonia had the lowest average number of prophages (0.2±1.1). However, more research needs to be done to further examine these patterns what, if any, impact these prophages are having on their hosts.