Human virome in health and disease

As an abundant component of the human microbiome, the importance of human virome only has been valued in recent decades, partly due to the difficulties in traditional virome studies such as culture-dependent isolation methods, which are labor and time-intensive and only extremely small portion of the virus is cultivable in the laboratory, besides the obstacles in the wet laboratory, the small virus’ genome size and lack of housekeeping genes, also blocked the widespread usage of sequencing methods in identify the novel virus. Although our knowledge of human virome is still limited, based on the development of culture-independent virus isolation methods such as viral-tagging, and the fast-growing metagenomics techniques, it’s now gradually recognized that human virome, with complex composition, could also affect human health status in various ways. In current days, frequent outbreaks of the novel virus spreading among people always cause huge loses, which implies we need to go further in human virome research, both virus identification and function characterization could be our tools to deal with future crisis related to human virome.