A genome-resolved atlas reveals lineage-specific activity patterns of prophages in cultured human gut bacteria

ACTIVE profiling of 31,150 cultured gut bacterial isolates shows 5.4% of prophages are detectably active under standard culture, with enrichment in Bacillota.

• Why it matters: Prophages shape the gut virome, but their baseline replication activity across cultured bacterial lineages has been hard to measure from sequencing data.
• What they did: The ACTIVE framework uses coverage-based signals from individual bacterial sequencing to build GPAC, then tests for activity-enriched viral families across 875 species.
• The result: GPAC links prophage activity to host taxonomy and viral lineages, identifying 46 significantly enriched viral families and highlighting SA-vFAM7 and SA-vFAM1 with broad host distributions.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.