The human virome in health and disease

We observed more animal cell viruses in our study. Upon reviewing our metadata, we discovered a strong association between breastfeeding and a lower recovery of virus-like particles. In our data visualization, yellow represents breastfed babies and green represents formula-fed babies. We identified various viruses in the samples, including adenovirus, anellovirus, astrovirus, calicivirus, enterovirus, and parvovirus. In the first 20 babies, we noticed a higher abundance of viruses in formula-fed babies compared to breastfed babies, although this difference was not statistically significant due to small sample size.

To further investigate, we conducted a study with 125 new babies in the US and found a statistically significant effect of breastfeeding on virus accumulation. We then expanded our research to include African babies, using qPCR for analysis. Our findings in the African samples were consistent with our previous results from the US cohorts. We only had rectal swabs for the African samples, so we used qPCR exclusively for those samples, revealing a significant difference in virus accumulation between breastfed and formula-fed babies.