Fig. 1

Work-flow of gut phageome metagenomic sequencing protocol used in this study and example of sequencing output. a Experimental and data analysis work-flow. The three main stages: sample processing, sequencing and sequencing data analyses are shown in blue, red and green, respectively. b Contig size and coverage statistics for the pooled contig database (n = 8,920) obtained in this study after size selection, in silico removal of potential bacterial DNA contamination, and removal of redundancy between samples. Linear contigs (n = 8,225) are shown in grey, circular ones (n = 695) in red. Centerlines for different distinct size classes of contigs are shown as dashed red lines. c Representative examples of different size classes of complete circular contigs identified in panel b. Hallmark gene characteristic of particular phage families are highlighted in colour