Songbird Fossil Virus May Help Predict Pandemics 42
Posted
by
samzenpus
from the oldest-medicine dept.
from the oldest-medicine dept.
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."
Re:Birds themselves could be creating new viruses (Score:2, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noncoding_DNA [wikipedia.org]
Look into it.
Re:Embedded virus ? (Score:4, Informative)
If a virus embed itself in the chromosomes of its host I am afraid it is no longer considered as a "virus".
You should rethink your position. The trick can be used to hide from the immune system and generate viruses of the sort you're familiar with at a future time.
Re:Embedded virus ? (Score:3, Informative)
What's interesting to me is (1) This type of virus doesn't normally put its code into host dna. and (2)The Hep(b) fossil in the songbirds genome and the Hep(b) virus infecting humans now are almost identical... Things to ponder.
As to 'viruses' in host dna, it's called "fossil virus", kind of like an animal fossilized in limestone etc. Not an animal, but we can learn from them.
Re:Birds themselves could be creating new viruses (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Birds themselves could be creating new viruses (Score:3, Informative)
That would make sense as birds are typically the first species to be attacked by such viruses.
Where did you get that from? Yes, there's the Avian Influenza, but from there to go on and say that birds are typically the source of such viruses? Most human Influenza viruses are from a human-origin. From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
"All influenza A pandemics since [the Spanish flu pandemic], and indeed almost all cases of influenza A worldwide (excepting human infections from avian viruses such as H5N1 and H7N7), have been caused by descendants of the 1918 virus, including "drifted" H1N1 viruses and reassorted H2N2 and H3N2 viruses. The latter are composed of key genes from the 1918 virus, updated by subsequently incorporated avian influenza genes that code for novel surface proteins, making the 1918 virus indeed the "mother" of all pandemics"
Further searching did not reveal the the origin of the 1918 virus was birds.
And talking about "such viruses", the article was talking about the Hepatitis Virus B (HBV). I don't know of any evidence that the virus came from birds, So please clarify the meaning of your original statement.
Re:Embedded virus ? (Score:1, Informative)
some virii have a strategy to insert their genetic material into the host, where it will remain dormant, until some event triggers the conversion of the dormant virus into the active form.
see https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Lysogenic_cycle [wikimedia.org]
sometimes virii that employ this strategy will be rendered inactive by dna methylation. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/DNA_methylation [wikimedia.org]
random mutation can then distort these DNA sequences in a way which is unlikely to be reversible, creating a "fossil virus"