The reporter learned from the computational biology and medical ecology group of Kunming Institute of zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences on the 6th that the research group recently published an evaluation report on the heterogeneity of human virome in the International Journal Journal of computational and structural biotechnology, which has important scientific and practical significance for deepening the understanding of human virome and the study of heterogeneity.

Diversity, especially biodiversity, is well known, but the concept of heterogeneity is often confused with diversity. In view of the difficulty of measurement, the research group led by Ma Zhanshan, a researcher of Kunming Institute of zoology, has proposed a method to measure heterogeneity based on Taylor power law model in recent years, including extending this Law from the classical population level to the community and ecological landscape scale, and has achieved a series of successful applications. In early 2020, novel coronavirus pneumonia infection was analyzed by the team, and the critical level of infection was estimated. In addition, in collaboration with Professor Taylor, the proponent of "Taylor power law" and the son of former chairman of the British Ecological Society, he complemented the classical "Red Queen" evolutionary hypothesis from the perspective of flora heterogeneity.

In this study, Taylor's power law is extended from a single virus to all kinds of viruses contained in human body, and the spatial variation parameter b = 1.916 is obtained, which is similar to the heterogeneity of human bacterial flora.

"The significance of studying this parameter lies in the expansion of future application research. For example, diseases may affect the heterogeneity of virome, and the change of heterogeneity may also reflect the health status of human host." Researcher Ma Zhanshan said that the heterogeneity of the virus group is similar to that of bacteria, but the high variability of the virus also makes it more difficult to classify and identify. Mammals carry more than 300000 kinds of viruses, but less than 1% of them have been identified so far.

The number of individuals in human viral group may be as high as 380 trillion, which is more than 100 times of the number of bacteria in human body, and a large part of them are bacteriophages of human bacteria. Without phage regulation, the intestinal flora may not always be the ally of human health“ In other words, bacteriophages are like chemical defense forces resident in our bodies! " Ma Zhanshan said that biodiversity conservation should obviously not be limited to higher animals and plants. The concept of heterogeneity is more suitable for the description of ecosystem.