The Lurker

December 12, 2014 10:08 AM

How A Virus Hid In Our Genome For Six Million Years. Carl Zimmer writes for Phenomena

PubMed: HIV infection reveals widespread expansion of novel centromeric human endogenous retroviruses.
Neanderthal virus DNA spotted hiding in modern humans

posted by the man of twists and turns (14 comments total)

It's an interesting article, and well presented. deeper digging will commence. But, as I was reading it I couldn't help wondering how info like this would be processed by the minds of creationists, and lo and behold, the top comment (I Know, I know never read the comments) shows that the creationist community is already rationalizing with pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo.
posted by OHenryPacey at 10:39 AM on December 12, 2014 [6 favorites]

Seems like an entrepreneurial opportunity for someone peddling a DNA registry cleaner product.
posted by Nevin at 10:58 AM on December 12, 2014 [7 favorites]

From the comments, note that the author has spelled the scientist's name "Markovitz" in some places and "Markovits" in others. He's mutating!
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 11:04 AM on December 12, 2014 [3 favorites]

Great article, but I have to say the comments here are far superior. :)
posted by Hutch at 11:28 AM on December 12, 2014

Our secret history persists, we can't hide from ourselves. It is interesting to learn some of the subtle pathways of evolution. Or, it is interesting to learn how life really works, and in the case of HIV patients how science may better make life work out for them.
posted by Oyéah at 12:22 PM on December 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

Interesting, but lacking in vital information as to how this helps me get superpowers.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:51 PM on December 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

What's more interesting to me about endogenous retroviruses is the growing body of evidence connecting them to conditions like schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis. Now someone just has to figure out how gut microbiota figure in all this, and we'll all be cured (fecal transplants for everyone?).
posted by greatgefilte at 12:59 PM on December 12, 2014 [4 favorites]

Related: The gene that jumped: Genes that leap from one species to another are more common than we thought. Does this shake up the tree of life?.
posted by Mo Nickels at 1:19 PM on December 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

From the first link:

This finding suggests that between 6 million and 800,000 years ago, K111 was duplicated a few times at a fairly slow pace. It’s possible that Markowitz and his colleagues missed some other copies because the reconstruction of those ancient genomes wasn’t quite accurate enough for their search. But even if we generously assumed that Neanderthals and Denisovans had twenty K111 viruses apiece, that’s still a small fraction of the 100 or more copies of K111 the scientists found in the human genome. It was only later, in the past 800,000 years, that K111 started proliferating at a faster pace.

If this is true it implies that there is something radically different about the way the human genome copies itself even compared to our very nearest relatives, a difference which allows a dormant retrovirus to spread throughout and goodness knows what else.
posted by jamjam at 1:26 PM on December 12, 2014

Just to take a shot in the dark as a non-scientist, I would think the radically different thing might just be that the population of human organisms throughout history has been several orders of magnitude higher than the populations of those other primates. It seems like that might provide a greater "attack surface" to the sum of the populations of a retrovirus, to borrow a term from security.
posted by XMLicious at 1:50 PM on December 12, 2014

Now someone just has to figure out how gut microbiota figure in all this, and we'll all be cured (fecal transplants for everyone?).

Perhaps they act as a vector for retroviruses?
posted by Nevin at 1:59 PM on December 12, 2014

Mo Nickels:

"Genes that leap from one species to another are more common than we thought. Does this shake up the tree of life?."

I certainly casts Monty Python's Holy Grail in an entirely new light...

"Your mother was a part hamster..."
posted by Hairy Lobster at 2:12 PM on December 12, 2014

That's a really good point, XMLicious; in your scenario, no new mechanism is needed because in every human generation there are many more individuals (after a certain point) and so there are that many more chances for the same mechanism to produce individuals with many more copies of the retrovirus, and since it's a ratchet (in other words there's no way to get rid of copies once they arise) any individual chromosome we look at now will have at least as many copies as its ancestor chromosome with the most copies (neglecting recombination), and since we were so numerous, many fewer of the individuals occupying the spaces of the descent diagram (2ⁿ for the nth generation back) will be the same individual than would be the case for chimps, say, and each one of those is a separate chance to be a source of multiple copies of the retrovirus code.
posted by jamjam at 2:52 PM on December 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

I thought the article was making the case that the reason it proliferated in humans was just that it happened to get into a part of the genome where there is much more churn (the centromeres).
posted by lastobelus at 7:26 PM on December 12, 2014