Bacterial viruses (bacteriophages, phages) of the gut have increasingly become a focus in microbiome studies, with an understanding that they are likely key players in health and disease. However, characterization of the virome remains largely based on bioinformatic approaches, with the impact of these viromes inferred based on a century of knowledge from aerobic phage work. Studying the phages infecting anaerobes is difficult, as they are often technically demanding to isolate and propagate. In this review, we primarily discuss the phages infecting three well-studied anaerobes in the gut: Bifidobacterium, Clostridia and Bacteroides, with a particular focus on the challenges in isolating and characterizing these phages. We contrast the lessons learned from these to other anaerobic work on phages infecting facultative anaerobes of the gut: Enterococcus and Lactobacillus. Phages from the gut do appear to adhere to the lessons learned from aerobic work, but the additional challenges of working on them has required ingenious new approaches to enable their study. This, in turn, has uncovered remarkable biology likely underpinning phage-host relationships in many stable environments.

肠道细菌病毒（噬菌体、噬菌体）越来越成为微生物组研究的焦点，因为人们认为它们可能是健康和疾病的关键参与者。然而，病毒组的表征仍然主要基于生物信息学方法，这些病毒组的影响是根据一个世纪的好氧噬菌体工作的知识推断出来的。研究感染厌氧菌的噬菌体很困难，因为它们通常在技术上需要分离和繁殖。在这篇综述中，我们主要讨论感染肠道中三种经过充分研究的厌氧菌的噬菌体：双歧杆菌、梭状芽孢杆菌和拟杆菌，特别关注分离和表征这些噬菌体的挑战。我们将从中吸取的经验教训与其他关于感染肠道兼性厌氧菌的噬菌体的厌氧工作进行对比：肠球菌和乳酸杆菌。来自肠道的噬菌体似乎确实遵循从有氧工作中吸取的经验教训，但研究它们的额外挑战需要巧妙的新方法来进行研究。这反过来又揭示了可能在许多稳定环境中支撑噬菌体-宿主关系的非凡生物学。