Recent studies demonstrated that alteration in the enteric bacterial populations contributes to gastrointestinal disease, including irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). However, less is known about the viral populations and their potential association with IBS.

Fresh fecal samples from 42 individuals were collected in a cohort of patients with IBS and healthy controls. We applied next generation-based metagenomics sequencing to characterize the enteric virome and assess the potential viral variation between healthy controls and IBS subjects. Sequencing completed on an Illumina Nextseq platform with a 2 × 150 paired-end read length and then several bioinformatics analyses were used to filter, trim and taxonomically assigned the raw read files. The final results were statically analyzed using R program.

The result indicated that bacteriophages of Caudovirales order were the most abundant viral taxa across the studied subgroups. Indeed, the diversity and richness of bacteriophages of Caudovirales and eukaryotic viruses of Megavirales were decreased in patients with IBS compared to healthy control. The specific alteration of enteric viruses also observed in association with different IBS subtypes.

The current finding suggests an alteration in the enteric virome might contribute to the pathophysiology of IBS. In addition, based on the unique viral species that have been observed in association with specific IBS-subtypes in this study, a new hypothesis could be proposed that enteric viral species have potential to be used as a biomarker for detecting IBS.