Giant viruses have brought new perspectives on the virosphere. They have been increasingly described in humans, including in several metagenomic studies. Here, we searched into the metagenome of the 5300-year-old Ötzi mummy for the presence of giant virus-related sequences using MG-Digger pipeline. We found 19 reads (0.00006% of the total read number) that best matched (mean ± standard deviation (range) for e-values of 5.0E-6 ± 1.4E-6 (6.0E-5–4.0E-10) and for amino acid identity of 69.9 ± 8.7% (46.4–84.9%) and most significantly with sequences from various giant viruses, including mostly mimiviruses. This expands current knowledge on the ubiquity and relationship with humans of giant viruses.

巨型病毒为病毒圈带来了新的视角。它们越来越多地在人类中被描述，包括在几项宏基因组研究中。在这里，我们使用 MG-Digger 管道搜索了 5300 年历史的 Ötzi 木乃伊的宏基因组中是否存在与病毒相关的巨大序列。我们发现 19 个读数（总读数的 0.00006%）最匹配（平均值 ± 标准偏差（范围），e值 5.0E-6 ± 1.4E-6 (6.0E-5–4.0E-10) 和氨基酸同一性为 69.9 ± 8.7% (46.4–84.9%)，最显着的是来自各种巨型病毒的序列，包括主要是拟态病毒。这扩展了目前关于巨型病毒普遍存在和与人类关系的知识。