# Distinct characteristics of the gut virome in patients with osteoarthritis and gouty arthritis

## TL;DR

This study finds that the gut virome differs in people with osteoarthritis and gouty arthritis compared to healthy individuals, suggesting potential for new diagnostic and treatment approaches.

## Contribution

The study identifies distinct viral signatures in osteoarthritis and gouty arthritis patients using metagenomic sequencing of the gut virome.

## Key findings

- OA and GA patients showed significant differences in gut virome diversity and viral family abundances compared to healthy controls.
- Classification models based on gut viral signatures achieved high accuracy (AUC up to 0.97) in distinguishing OA and GA patients from healthy controls.
- OA-associated viruses were linked to pro-inflammatory bacteria, while GA-associated viruses were connected to Bacteroidaceae or Lachnospiraceae phages.

## Abstract

The gut microbiota and its metabolites play crucial roles in pathogenesis of arthritis, highlighting gut microbiota as a promising avenue for modulating autoimmunity. However, the characterization of the gut virome in arthritis patients, including osteoarthritis (OA) and gouty arthritis (GA), requires further investigation.

We employed virus-like particle (VLP)-based metagenomic sequencing to analyze gut viral community in 20 OA patients, 26 GA patients, and 31 healthy controls, encompassing a total of 77 fecal samples.

Our analysis generated 6819 vOTUs, with a considerable proportion of viral genomes differing from existing catalogs. The gut virome in OA and GA patients differed significantly from healthy controls, showing variations in diversity and viral family abundances. We identified 157 OA-associated and 94 GA-associated vOTUs, achieving high accuracy in patient-control discrimination with random forest models. OA-associated viruses were predicted to infect pro-inflammatory bacteria or bacteria associated with immunoglobulin A production, while GA-associated viruses were linked to Bacteroidaceae or Lachnospiraceae phages. Furthermore, several viral functional orthologs displayed significant differences in frequency between OA-enriched and GA-enriched vOTUs, suggesting potential functional roles of these viruses. Additionally, we trained classification models based on gut viral signatures to effectively discriminate OA or GA patients from healthy controls, yielding AUC values up to 0.97, indicating the clinical utility of the gut virome in diagnosing OA or GA.

Our study highlights distinctive alterations in viral diversity and taxonomy within gut virome of OA and GA patients, offering insights into arthritis etiology and potential treatment and prevention strategies.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12967-024-05374-6.