#AI Reads Urine# Viral Fragments in the Urine Proteome: New Clues to the Cause of Fever

This article is about a study that explores the use of urine biomarkers to find out the causes of fever. Fever can be caused by many things like infections, inflammation, drug side effects, and tumors. Figuring out the exact cause of fever is very important for doctors to treat patients well, but it's often a difficult problem, especially for fevers of unknown origin.

The researchers in this study collected urine samples from 11 patients with fever of unknown origin and 8 healthy people. Urine is a good sample for research because it's easy to collect, non - invasive, and can show subtle changes in the body. The researchers used a method called liquid chromatography - tandem mass spectrometry to analyze the proteins in the urine. This method is very sensitive and can detect both high - and low - abundance proteins.

After analyzing the urine samples, the researchers found that there were many viral fragments in the urine proteins. They identified 26 viral proteins, and 13 of them had specific peptide sequences. When they compared the urine samples of patients with those of healthy people, they found that the amounts of some viruses in the patients' urine were much higher. For example, in patient F1, the amount of Salivirus A detected in the urine was 4289 times higher than that in the healthy control group, and the amount of Rotavirus A was 16 times higher.

However, the healthy people's urine also had some viral peptides, but these might be from latent viruses they carried or exposure to non - pathogenic viruses in the environment. These trace fragments usually don't cause any clinical symptoms. The significant increase in the amount of specific viruses in the patients' urine suggests that the abnormal growth of these viruses might be related to the cause of their fever.

This study has some limitations. The number of patients and healthy controls was small, so the results might not be applicable to a larger population. Also, the detection of viral fragments only relied on one technology and couldn't be cross - verified with traditional methods.

In conclusion, this study shows that there are viral protein fragments in the urine proteome, and these fragments are significantly different between patients with fever and healthy people. This discovery provides new clues for finding out the causes of fevers and other viral infectious diseases. It suggests that urine biomarkers could be very useful in clinical diagnosis, but more research is needed to make this a reliable diagnostic method.

Biology 2025, 14(4), 318; https://doi.org/10.3390/biology14040318

Youhe Gao

Statement: During the preparation of this work the author(s) used Doubao / AI reading for summarizing the content. After using this tool/service, the author(s) reviewed and edited the content as needed and take(s) full responsibility for the content of the published article.