Slashdot Mirror
8% of Your DNA Comes From a Virus
An anonymous reader writes "About 8 percent of human genetic material comes from a virus and not from our ancestors, according to an article by University of Texas at Arlington biology professor Cédric Feschotte, published in the Jan. 7, 2010 issue of Nature magazine."
Is any of that DNA in use or are those parts dormant? What effect do these modifications have on us beyond the initial use of replication and further propagation of viruses?
8% of my Windows code comes from Viruses.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here, Mr. Malda. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague and we are the cure.
The real news here doesn't appear to be that endogenization has occured through our past (OK, maybe the 8% number is news; I don't know about the numbers...) but instead that a virus, bornavirus, is displaying this property. This is news because bornaviruses are not retroviruses (previously the only know virus-types to produce endogenous copies.) Furthermore, the article seems to suspect that this virus may have ties to the schizophrenia and mood disorders...
Demented But Determined.
It does, but as a side effect you are unresponsive 80% of your time.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
"Any sufficiently large set of information is going to give you some matches on just about anything you search for."
Yes, but not a sufficiently large rate of matches. If the researchers are competent, they can calculate what percent of the data would be expected to match their search even if the data is just random, and decide if the match rate exceeds that by a significant margin. The 'researchers' of the Bible Code were clearly not competent in exactly this way.
As opposed to the paperback book market, Nature does not tend to print whatever comes across it's desk.
Google for placenta and endogenous (as in endogenous virus). The placenta uses a lot of viral code, to the extent that it might be more virus than anything else. It also sheds a lot of viruses. The placenta is almost a different life form.
BTW, the Wikipedia entry shows that the "8%" number was known as long as 6 years ago.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_retrovirus
Much like someone who copies the content of their old computer straight over to a new computer every few years. Repeat this process a few billion times, and you'll be quite surprised at the amount of sheer useless crap that just keeps getting copied. Voila! DNA.
where BDV here is the virus whose DNA they were searching for in the human genome. There you go, if you're depressed, manic or schizophrenic, it could be one of your ancestors got a brain virus.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
The moral of the story is, cannibalism really does allow you to take your enemies strength. That's why we eat Jesus' flesh on Sundays, so we can absorb his holy virus and become like God.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
That's why I eat copious amounts of pasta, so that I, too, may be touched by His Noodly Appendage.
Commit yourself daily to serving The Lord
With some fava beans and a nice Chianti, fthfthfthfth.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Ahhh religion, where changing flesh into bread and blood into wine isnt considered "witchcraft". Yet all other "magics" was at one time punishable. Hypocrisy, it loves religion.
And Slashdot, where every story about biology turns into an attack on Christianity or some other faith. Things were different in the Pit & the Pendulum days, but lately it seems like you attack them way more than they attack you.
There are 4^3000 (about 1.5*10^1806) different 3000 letter works (if you only have 4 characters). The odds of finding your specific one in a 3 trillion collection of random letters is so small, you can't even imagine how small it is. (approx 1 in 2*10^1794)
But let's try anyway. Imagine playing the universal lottery. You are supposed to pick one subatomic particle in the entire universe, and if you choose the correct one you get 1 nickle, the odds of winning is about 1 in 10^80, if you were to enter that lottery a billion trillion times a second (10^21) by the time all protons in the universe would have decayed the likelyhood that you would have won even once would be so small that you could not even imagine. Never the less.
Now imagine playing that lottery one time for each billion trillion times times you look through a different set of random characters (with each set being 3 trillion characters). After having won that lottery, not once, but enough times to build a tower of your nickles 1000 times longer than the circumference of the entire universe the likelyhood of you having found a matching set to your 3000 character set would be so close to 0, that you still can not even imagine how small it is.
So my guess would be that this virus dna didn't just appear by chance in the dna of humans.