Concentration of phages in faeces

Range 10^10 - 10^11 phage particles/g faeces
Organism Horse Equus caballus
Reference Letarov A, Kulikov E. The bacteriophages in human- and animal body-associated microbial communities. J Appl Microbiol. 2009 Jul107(1):1-13. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2672.2009.04143.x. p.2 right column bottom paragraphPubMed ID19239553
Primary Source Cann, J.A., Fandrich, S.E. and Heaphy, S. (2005) Analysis of the virus population present in equine faeces indicates the presence of hundreds of uncharacterized virus genomes. Virus Genes 30, 151–156.PubMed ID15744573
Method Primary source abstract: "Virus DNA was isolated from horse faeces and cloned in a sequence-independent fashion. 268 clones were sequenced and 178140 nucleotides of sequence obtained. Statistical analysis suggests the library contains 17560 distinct clones derived from up to 233 different virus genomes."
Comments P.2 right column botttom paragraph: "In horse faeces, judging by the yield of phage DNA from an extracted uncultured viral community (primary source), [investigators] can expect about 10^10–10^11 phage particles per gram of faeces. In ultra-thin sections of horse faeces examined by TEM, [they] were unable to visualize this expected number of phage particles (their unpublished observation). In the work of Breitbart et al. (2003), a uncultured viral community was isolated from human faeces and VLP [virus-like particles] were visualized by fluorescent microscopy. However, no quantitative estimation of VLP concentration was reported."
Entered by Uri M
ID 112504