Don't like to go searching for gut viruses? Use a computer instead, they are much cleaner

The Neuroscience Information Framework often gets questions about what types of things can be found in the data about brains presumably because people would rather poke in brains than data.

However, some of our bioinformatics colleagues from the other side of town (at SDSU) that really didn't want to go searching though their gut contents did it virtually and discovered a new highly prevalent virus.

Actually this is a bacteriophage that was found in samples from about half of gut microbiomes sampled and cleanly deposited as data in various databases.

Now there is a whole new reason to look at databases that I never thought of. They are just a lot less messy!!!

See more about the phage here: http://newscenter.sdsu.edu/sdsu_newscenter/news.aspx?s=75082