Yonsei University said Monday that a research team led by Lee In-suk, a professor at its College of Life Science and Biotechnology, has built the world's largest gut virome genome catalog for laboratory mice and demonstrated that viral data alone can accurately predict biological aging, marking a major advance in microbiome research and biomarker discovery. The team analyzed 2,638 gut metagenomic datasets from Korea and abroad to build the Mouse Reference Gut Virome (MRGV), comprising 109,778 viral genomes representing 28,824 viral species. The world's largest catalog of its kind expands known viral diversity by about 68 percent compared with existing databases. The researchers also reconstructed hundreds of thousands of previously unassembled viral genomes, substantially improving genome completeness. Using the catalog, the team identified relationships between gut viruses and bacteria and conducted comparative analyses between human and mouse viromes. Notably, they showed that gut viral profiles alone can predict age of mice with high accuracy. Many viruses most strongly associated wit