Fig. 5: Three VCs that are hallmarks for either MetS or healthy control viromes are part of the widespread Candidatus Heliusviridae family of gut phages.

a heatmap and hierarchical clustering of pairwise shared protein cluster values for 261 contigs from the current study and 61 previously isolated phages that all shared the same nine core Ca. Heliusviridae genes (blastp > 50). The dendrogram is cut to form three clusters, which are color coded above the heatmap as Ca. alpha- (green), beta- (yellow), and gammaheliusvirinae (purple). The top row of colors beneath the dendrogram denote the differentially abundant VCs, from left to right: VC_1639_0 (blue), VC_803_0 (green), VC_1801_0 (red), and VC_818_0 (purple). The legend denotes percent of total protein clusters that are shared. As some core genes formed several protein clusters, values can be below 10%. b An unrooted approximate maximum-likelihood tree built from a concatenated alignment of nine genes shared by all genomes in a, with colors defining subfamily membership according to a, and with the VCs significantly differentially abundant in either MetS or controls denoted. Dots on tree branches signify bootstrap values ≥95. c the prevalence of the Candidatus Heliusviridae groups among bulk and VLP phage populations. d The relative abundances of the Candidatus Heliusviridae and the groups in bulk phage populations. n = 97/n = 99 biologically independent samples for MetS and controls, respectively. Q values are denoted as follows * ≤ 0.05, ** ≤ 0.01, *** ≤ 0.001, **** ≤ 0.0001. Box plots show the median (middle line), 25th, and 75th percentile (box), with the 25th percentile minus and the 75th percentile plus 1.5 times the interquartile range (whiskers), and outliers (single points). Source data are provided as a Source Data file.