Early-life bovine respiratory virome analysis reveals phage-driven adaptation and cross-host evolutionary signatures.

Longitudinal profiling of beef calf upper respiratory tract viromes from birth to weaning shows increased viral richness and turnover, with temperate phages dominating and sharing adaptation-linked genes.

• Why it matters: Early-life respiratory virome establishment in cattle—and how it connects evolutionarily to viruses from other hosts—remains underexplored despite zoonotic outbreak relevance at the human-animal interface.
• What they did: The study used an optimized viral enrichment procedure and metagenomic workflow to longitudinally profile the URT virome from birth to weaning, then performed targeted reassembly and competitive mapping to human respiratory datasets.
• The result: Temperate phages dominated the URT phage community and vertebrate-associated viruses emerged after the first week; reassembled CoV-D180 and AdV-D56 genomes positioned between bovine and human lineages and showed genome-specific, regionally structured coverage patterns.