The gut microbiome profoundly affects human health and disease, and their infecting viruses are likely as important, but often missed because of reference database limitations. Here, we (1) built a human Gut Virome Database (GVD) from 2,697 viral particle or microbial metagenomes from 1,986 individuals representing 16 countries, (2) assess its effectiveness, and (3) report a meta-analysis that reveals age-dependent patterns across healthy Westerners. The GVD contains 33,242 unique viral populations (approximately species-level taxa) and improves average viral detection rates over viral RefSeq and IMG/VR nearly 182-fold and 2.6-fold, respectively. GVD meta-analyses show highly personalized viromes, reveal that inter-study variability from technical artifacts is larger than any “disease” effect at the population level, and document how viral diversity changes from human infancy into senescence. Together, this compact foundational resource, these standardization guidelines, and these meta-analysis findings provide a systematic toolkit to help maximize our understanding of viral roles in health and disease.

肠道微生物组深刻地影响着人类的健康和疾病，它们的感染病毒可能同样重要，但由于参考数据库的限制常常被忽视。在这里，我们 (1) 根据来自 16 个国家的 1,986 名个体的 2,697 个病毒颗粒或微生物宏基因组建立了人类肠道病毒组数据库 (GVD)，(2) 评估其有效性，以及 (3) 报告了一项荟萃分析，揭示了年龄依赖性健康西方人的模式。 GVD 包含 33,242 个独特的病毒种群（大约是物种级别的分类群），与病毒 RefSeq 和 IMG/VR 相比，平均病毒检出率分别提高了近 182 倍和 2.6 倍。 GVD 荟萃分析显示了高度个性化的病毒组，揭示了技术人工制品带来的研究间变异大于群体水平上的任何“疾病”效应，并记录了病毒多样性如何从人类婴儿期到衰老期的变化。这一紧凑的基础资源、这些标准化指南和这些荟萃分析结果共同提供了一个系统的工具包，帮助我们最大限度地了解病毒在健康和疾病中的作用。