PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Ema H. Graham
AU  - Michael S. Adamowicz
AU  - Peter C. Angeletti
AU  - Jennifer L. Clarke
AU  - Samodha C. Fernando
AU  - Joshua R. Herr
TI  - Diversity, abundance, and host specificity of the human skin associated circular and single stranded DNA virome
AID  - 10.1101/2022.05.22.492996
DP  - 2022 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2022.05.22.492996
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/05/23/2022.05.22.492996.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/05/23/2022.05.22.492996.full
AB  - The human skin is our point of contact with the microbial world, yet little is known about the diversity of the skin virome. Studies of the human skin virome have focused on bacteriophage and double-stranded DNA viral genomes, however, there have been few efforts to characterize circular single-stranded DNA viruses that populate human skin. Here, we evaluate the diversity of the circular single-stranded DNA virome collected across three anatomical skin locations from 60 human individuals with five time-point collections spanning six-months. Our analyses resulted in the identification of 272 novel and unique Rep-encoded single-stranded DNA viruses associated with human skin. Sequence similarity networks and maximum likelihood estimations of the Rep and Capsid protein amino acid sequences from our sequencing and public database references, reveal family level stability of the Cressdnaviricota across the study participants and a larger host-range than previously thought for these putative multi-host pathogens.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.