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A ground-breaking study published on F1000Research revealed that SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) replicates in our gut bacteria, potentially making the disease more severe. We spoke to the corresponding author, Mauro Petrillo, about what this tells us about the relationship between our gut microbiome and COVID-19. Keep reading to uncover the study’s far-reaching implications for the prevention and treatment of the virus.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this feature are those of the interviewee/author and do not represent the practice or opinions of the European Commission or Seidor.

Your recent study investigates the relationship between COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 infected feces. Tell us, how did this study come to fruition? 

My co-authors and I were inspired to write the paper during a brainstorm about the clinical gastrointestinal symptoms of COVID-19. These include abdominal pains, diarrhea, and gut dysbiosis (an imbalance in the microbiome). 

Our primary interest is the diagnostics field, including variants detection and the understanding of the virus’s life cycle. As such, we decided to investigate if and for how long SARS-CoV-2 can reside and persist in human feces. For this reason, we designed a straightforward experiment to assess the presence of SARS-CoV-2 in bacterial cultures obtained by feces. 

What did you find?

We observed something completely unexpected: the bacteriophage-like behavior of SARS-CoV-2. A bacteriophage is a type of virus that infects bacteria.

We repeated the experiment several times and tested all possible explanations, from eukaryotic cells in the cultures to laboratory contaminations. However, the repetitions with different starting materials and new controls gave the same results. There was no indication of the presence of cells other than bacterial ones in the cultures.

What are the implications of these findings?

SARS-CoV-2 may replicate in the bacteria of our guts. To our knowledge, researchers have never observed such behavior before.

Consequently, we decided to share our results immediately in an open, transparent manner with the scientific community. Our goal is to discuss and eventually repeat what we observed. If research confirms that the microbial community in our gut is another so-far unknown target of SARS-CoV-2, the implications are significant. 

We must now look at COVID-19 and long-term COVID-19 from new perspectives to better understand the disease and to develop more targeted therapies, including in the presence of comorbidities. The same applies to other diseases in case such a phage-like behavior is not limited to SARS-CoV-2. 

How do these results provide new insights into the epidemiology of COVID-19?

A ‘bacteriophage-like’ behavior of SARS-CoV-2 might explain the long-term presence of SARS-CoV-2 observed in recovered patients. Moreover, the alterations of the equilibrium of our gut microbial community might play a role in cases of severe progress of COVID-19 disease and the mechanisms related to SARS-CoV-2 mutability. 

Healthy diet regimes that prevent dysbiosis conditions and keep the microbiota healthy might counteract COVID-19 severe progress inhibit the appearance and spread of SARS-CoV-2 variants.

These hypotheses need to be appropriately studied and confirmed. Therefore, we immediately shared these observations with the scientific community.

Why did you choose to publish with F1000Research?

Our results are new, and we expect them to be subject to an open scientific debate. Therefore, we preferred to go through an open research publishing platform, where:

• All articles are published open access.
• The publishing and peer review processes are fully transparent.
• The authors are solely responsible for the content of their papers.

We selected F1000Research as it offers all of this. Also, expert reviewers’ reports and identities are published alongside the article, as are the authors’ responses and comments from registered users. All these factors lend themselves to the scientific debate we hope our study will initiate.

What’s next for research on the gut microbiome and COVID-19?

My colleagues are currently collecting additional evidence, which will be part of a forthcoming paper. They have identified at least two bacterial species usually present in our gut that, when grown on agar plates, are vulnerable to SARS-CoV-2 presence. We have observed phage-like plaques, and sequencing of the RNA is ongoing. 

Simultaneously, as anticipated in another paper on F1000Research, studies on the role of the observed toxin-like peptides in plasma, urine, and faecal samples from COVID-19 patients are ongoing.

Finally, the Joint Research Centre recently published a report about the relationship between the gut microbiome and diseases, including COVID-19.

As written in our paper’s Discussion section, we need to address COVID-19 and other challenging diseases using a One Health holistic approach. According to this approach, individuals are both human bodies and ‘holobionts’ — discrete ecological units that must be studied and treated as such.

Read the complete study today on F1000Research to learn more about the relationship between the gut microbiome and COVID-19.