Aggregated Gut Viral Catalog (AVrC)

The Aggregated Gut Viral Catalog (AVrC) harmonizes and expands existing human gut viral catalogs into a unified modular resource containing 1,018,941 dereplicated viral sequences (449,859 species-level vOTUs) to facilitate research into gut virome diversity and its role in human health and disease.

Key Features:

• Unified Aggregation: Integrates nine previously published human gut viral catalogs that collectively screened more than 40,000 human fecal metagenomes.
• Catalog Expansion: Incorporates 7,867 infant gut metagenomes from 12 large-scale infant studies collected in 9 different countries.
• Species-Level Dereplication: Contains 449,859 species-level vOTUs derived from 1,018,941 dereplicated viral sequences.
• Computational Annotations: Provides sequence quality, viral taxonomy, predicted viral lifestyle, and putative host annotations for each vOTU representative using computational inference tools.
• Modular Framework: Enables future expansions as novel data becomes available.

Scientific Applications:

• Gut Virome Diversity Exploration: Supports systematic comparison of viral catalog quality, diversity, and overlap across multiple independent resources.
• Host-Virus Interaction Research: Enables investigation of putative bacterial hosts and predicted viral lifestyles in the human gut ecosystem.
• Infant Gut Microbiome Studies: Expands viral sequence representation from early-life gut metagenomic datasets across diverse geographic populations.
• Comparative Metagenomics: Facilitates reuse and cross-study analysis of previously published viral catalogs through a single harmonized resource.

Methodology:

AVrC was constructed by systematically surveying nine previously published human gut viral catalogs, mining 7,867 infant gut metagenomes from 12 large-scale infant studies, dereplicating sequences to species-level vOTUs, and annotating each vOTU representative with sequence quality, viral taxonomy, predicted viral lifestyle, and putative host using computational inference tools.