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The Role of Retroviruses in Human Evolution
mhackarbie writes "The current edition of the New Yorker magazine has up a story about endogenous retroviruses in the genomes of humans and other species. Although researchers have known about such non-functional retroviral 'fossils' in the human genome for some time, the large amount of recent genomic data underscores just how pervasive they are, in a compelling tale that involves humans, their primate cousins, and a variety of viral invaders. Some researchers are even bringing back non-functional viral remnants from the dead by fixing their broken genes."
First Infection
So what you're saying is we will now have zombie viruses?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Fixing the genes of 'broken' viruses that clearly have the ability to infect us seems pretty damned stupid. Spanish flu, Avian flu, 30,000 BC flu... Here comes the next pandemic. While we're at fixing 'broken' viruses in our DNA, let's fix other viruses while we're at it... Why don't we just fix that part where they're drug resistant? Oh... we can't do that? Then what the hell makes them think we have enough knowledge to 'fix' the ones in our DNA?
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
HIV is the only virus in which drug resistance is a problem - because most aren't affected by any drugs in the first place. Maybe you're thinking of bacteria?
In any case, I'd prefer it if they'd experiment with mouse retroviruses instead...
Your parents protected you with a full-body bubblewrap until age 35, didn't they.
See the thing about retroviruses is that once they work their way into the genome, they begin to do wack things. They predispose the person to wear bell bottom geans, listen to funk music, wear tube socks, and any number of out of fashion things. They begin to force the person to speak in archaic manners, eg "Thou hast been up intowards my grill!" So I think it's safe to say that we need to eliminate retroviruses as a mechanism of mutation. There comes a time to let certain things go.
If I have beneficial bacteria in my gut that keeps dangerous ones from living there, perhaps we can revitalize some harmless retrovirus to compete for the niche that the AIDS retrovirus lives in.
I, for one, welcome our newly re-animated zombie retroviral overlords!
How do we know the the retrovirus genome didn't originate with the hosts themselves? Did these viruses evolve truly independently, or might they have started out as fragments of genetic code from some larger organism which somehow escaped and became self-sufficient?
In other words, when we look at the human genome and say, "This is riddled with retroviruses!" is it not possible that the retroviruses were actually there all along, and only later became able to leave the parent cell and operate independently?
Are retroviruses actually just chunks of "rebel DNA" from our own genome, or possibly from some other species?
What you're describing is probably possible, but for any given stretch of DNA encoding the right polymerases, it's a lot more likely that it's a retrovirus that lost the ability to leave the cell than that it's a transposon that gained that ability and then lost it again.
Is what I meant to say.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The "Rebel DNA" would like to pretend it left for personal reasons or perhaps to spend more time with its family.
Are we too polite to acknowlege that it was actually forced to resign?
Such viruses may be responsible for the Cambrian Explosion. A new kind of virus may have helped "share good ideas" like eyes, nervous systems, enzymes, etc. between different species of early animals. This may have propelled evolution by allowing life to mix and match instead of each branch having to reinvent stuff from scratch.
Table-ized A.I.
that have emergence of HERVs at the core of their plotlines are Darwin's Radio and Darwin's Children, by Greg Bear. Good reads, both.
Umbrella Corporation unavailable for comment.
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
If it was never alive in the first place?
Scientists still debate if viruses meet the definition of life as we know it. I'm certainly not qualified to render an opinion on the matter; I just think it's fascinating how viruses occupy this gray area between our definitions of living and non-living.
Here's a PDF of a SciAm article about this very debate, written by the Director of Virus Research at UC Irvine.
Scientists still debate if viruses meet the definition of life as we know it. I'm certainly not qualified to render an opinion on the matter; I just think it's fascinating how viruses occupy this gray area between our definitions of living and non-living.
At C2.com we've debated long and hard about a definition of "life". I favor a multi-factor approach. If enough factors score high, then it's "life". The factors include consume energy, reproduce, metabolize, capable of self-repair, and subject to natural selection, among others.
A lot of parasites depend on hosts, so depending on hosts shouldn't knock out viruses from qualifying.
Perhaps a Boolean definition is not the way to go. There are shades of gray and we should perhaps embrace them. I for one sort of welcome our semi-overlords.
Table-ized A.I.
This article, and the many creative postulations by the /. comunity really would make for a good book, or movie. Kind of a cool concept really.
I am open source, and Linux baby!
That we are large single organism,while in fact the organism is constant battleground of cells,viruses and bacteria,which have to live peacefully,unless they want the host to die a quick death.
As a chemical engineer, this subject is quite interesting and the potentials are strikingly similar to chemical (physical) analogues - a quick Google search, however, is awash in fiction. Any recommendations for legitimate texts on the subject?
The article mentions how HIV can infect other primates but not cause disease, and even gives a molecular explanation. So how will this be spun?
Profreding is for squares!!
I've read that it appears that the mammilian placentia may have "learned" how to share life-giving fluids between baby and mother without the immune system complaining via a virus that knew how to disable the immune system for its own needs. I'll see if I can find the article.
This is not the same article I originally read, but generally states the same thing:
http://www.dbc.uci.edu/~faculty/villarreal/new1/erv-placental.html
Quote: "It is widely accepted that viral agents act a negative selecting force on their host. However, [embedded] viral agents [studied] have very high mutation and adaption rates. This character led Salvador Luria to speculate early on that perhaps viruses contribute to [beneficial] host evolution (52)."
Table-ized A.I.
"In 1970, when they detected biochemically that there is a reverse flow of genetic material, they didn't give up the dogma or even try to change it. Instead, they called it an exception to the central dogma of molecular genetics, and explained it by postulating the existence of retroviruses."
This article is probably the best to hit /. in months. This article was an excellent read. I can only hope there will be more articles like this, and not another review of some craptastic PS3/360/wii game. Real news!!
From what I was just reading now, maybe the RNA world which some theorists have speculated (theorized) predated the DNA biological world we presently live in was the place where something like viruses could reproduce themselves.
But I'm probably misunderstanding everything I read today.
My personal opinion?
I remember playing with a 6802 prototyping board with a flaky power-on reset circuit. (I used cheap switches from Radio Shack.) It had a monitor ROM, of course, then later it had BASIC in ROM. If power came up too fast, the ROM would not be ready to put the reset vector on the bus, and the CPU would jump somewhere else. Sometimes, if the reset button worked, I could look at RAM, and I would find bits and pieces of the ROM sitting out there. Until the thing stabilized, sometimes it was not particular interesting, but sometimes it would dump almost intelligible strings, or even clots of error messages or the symbol tables into video RAM.
I had read, at the time, about how computers with disk drives had to have good power-on reset circuits, or had to be booted up with no media in the drives, and media loaded after the operator stabilized the CPU. Otherwise, the disk drives would tend to get told to write random data on the disks, which, of course, kind of ruins the whole purpose of having disks.
I had also read that (some of?) the first computer viruses were inspired by some of the junk that was left in memory by such episodes of uncontrolled execution.
So I have tended to wonder whether it might not be the case that viruses are not some independent remnants of proto-life, but are rather the results of genetic accidents.
I'm not sure we could tell the difference from looking at the archeological record.
But it's interesting that one of the biologists the friendly article quotes made a comment that almost equated viruses with God.
Once we figure out if a virus is a live, we can start to think about prions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion
current edition of the New Yorker
You mean last week's edition of the New Yorker. This week's story is about how checklists in ICU's would save bazillions of dollars and lives.