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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."
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...
Well, the cure might or might not be so easy . . . if we already knew it was a genetic malady, there's a good chance we knew the gene to some degree, and finding out that it's an ancestral retrovirus gives fairly minimal new information on how to address it. If we were once tolerant of it and now are not, that implies some cost to the tolerance-granting genes, since we lost them . . . in that case, they may not be around to find, and even if they are, where do you look? If we acquired some new trait that made us vulnerable to this now-dormant virus, that's going to be even less helpful, and again, how do you tell? All of this boils down to, we've got a touch more information about origin, but it doesn't point us anywhere.
The real benefits of this research lie elsewhere - in the ability to recover and play with old viruses, see what they do, and possibly track their evolution through the genetic record, which may help us combat the change and spread of nasty current retroviruses like HIV.
"There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order." - Ed Howdershelt
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.
Researchers work every day with viruses that are known to be incredibly dangerous, not just those that might be such as these putative retroviral fossils. So if you're worrying about something escaping the lab and causing a global pandemic, there are more serious threats. Really, this is pretty safe compared to ongoing work on, say, Ebola.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I just think it's fascinating how viruses occupy this gray area between our definitions of living and non-living.
Life or living is just a word, not reality. If a virus is alive or not alive is about as interesting a question as asking if submarines swim or not.
AccountKiller
What do you mean "will?" It's nothing new, so they must have developed a "logical" retort by now.
We study HIV by infecting chimps and Rhesus monekys. Furthermore, it's long been thought/accepted
that HIV evolved from SIV.
Were that I say, pancakes?
I'd imagine other forms of life to be more complicated than viruses, and the general consensus seems to be that they developed by random chance - they can't evolve until they're complicated enough to reproduce.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face