Songbird Fossil Virus May Help Predict Pandemics

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers announced they found a fossil virus hiding in the most unexpected place: the chromosomes of several songbird species. This ancient virus resembles human hepatitis B virus. Finding this ancient virus will catalyze new lines of inquiry that may help scientists predict and prevent future human viral pandemics that originate in birds."

Comments

Re:Ugh, boring.

[Tangentc]

Way to not invent a hover-board again science.

I love that this comment implies that the /. user base would not only like scientific research to favor the production of trivial amusement devices rather than preventing massive death tolls from illnesses, but would prefer that those amusement devices be almost suicidal to use.

Re:Birds themselves could be creating new viruses

[ColdWetDog]

No, you have it backwards. Yet another bad analogy... These viral sequences have been embedded in the bird DNA by mechanisms carried by the viruses. That's why they were first found in retroviruses (that do this sort of thing for a living). The bird DNA isn't 'making' the virus. In fact, the viruses are not coding for proteins due to numerous mutations that hit that part of the genome over time. Since the DNA is silent, the mutations don't affect anything and there is no selection for an active virus (or active anything).

While it's theoretically possible that more mutations could recreate functional proteins, the odds of that would be astoundingly low. You could also envision some sort of chromosomal rearrangement that would re create something biologically active, but again that is very, very unlikely. It is a bit more likely (although there is no current evidence of this) that small bits of viral DNA would code for some controlling RNA or small protein that would interact with bird DNA in some way. The state of the art isn't able to tease things apart at this level. But the bird genome isn't 'creating' a virus. This would be like asking a word processing program written for CP/M then transferred by paper tape to a TRS 80, then transferred by modem a computer running OS X to start decoding video streams. Not going to happen.

DNA under selection rarely does nothing

[SpeleoNut]

I found these two statements in the article to be somewhat at odds with each other.
1. "The viruses that we found are very old, are integrated in the bird genome, and do not have the potential to encode any functional protein product," said Dr Gilbert. "So they do not have any effect in songbirds."
2. "a strikingly slow, long-term mutation rate that is 1,000 times slower than the viral [mutation] rates that had previously been estimated based on comparisons of currently circulating viral sequences only."
If the sequences are being in someway preserved they may well be having an effect. Perhaps not coding a protein themselves but altering the levels, timing or tissue specificity of gene expression in their vicinity. Also the presence of these similar sequences throughout the songbird genome can drive novel DNA recombination events which can result in new phenotypes, driving songbird evolution.