Viruses are widely regarded as harmful to our health, but a subset of viruses living in the gut could play a crucial role in regulating stress, research suggests.
The discovery adds to mounting evidence that interactions between the gut and brain influence people’s behaviours, and could eventually lead to new treatments for stress-related conditions that target the vast community of viruses living inside us.
While previous studies have suggested that the composition of microbes living in the gut changes in response to stress, these have largely focused on bacteria, rather than on this “virome”.
“The way the virome interacts with bacteria, and how they affect stress-related health and disease status is largely unexplored,” said Dr Nathaniel Ritz, of the APC Microbiome Ireland research centre at University College Cork. “Our research opens up the potential to target the virome to treat and reduce the effects of stress.”
Ritz and his colleagues focused on a subset of viruses called bacteriophages, which infect bacteria and replicate alongside them. They studied what happened to these viruses when the mice they inhabited were exposed to chronic social stresses, such as being housed alone or in overcrowded conditions, and found that stress exposure led to changes in the composition of the viruses and the bacteria in the animals’ guts.
Next, they harvested viruses from the droppings of unstressed healthy animals, and transplanted some of them back in, once the mice had been exposed to chronic social stress. The research, published in Nature Microbiology, suggested these transplants reduced levels of stress hormones and curbed depression- and anxiety-like behaviour in the mice.
While further studies are needed to assess whether virus transplants are beneficial to humans suffering from stress-related conditions, the research provides some of the first evidence that gut viruses are involved in the response to stress, and that manipulating them could have therapeutic benefits.
“Given that the virome composition varies greatly among individuals, it may open the door for personalised medicine approaches for stress-related disorders in the future,” said Prof John Cryan at APC Microbiome Ireland, who led the research. “One thing for certain, we must acknowledge that not all viruses are bad and they can play a key role in keeping the bad bacteria in our gut at bay especially in times of stress.”