8% of Your DNA Comes From a Virus 478
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."
Ob. Matrix quote (Score:2, Funny)
Humans are a virus!
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Re:Ob. Matrix quote (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ob. Matrix quote (Score:5, Funny)
That's why I eat copious amounts of pasta, so that I, too, may be touched by His Noodly Appendage.
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So with more MSG from all the chinese food I might become the next Buddha? About time, I already have had his body for a while.
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Hypocrisy, it loves religion.
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How is that hypocrisy?
Raising the dead, walking on water, healing the sick, etc, etc. All can be done* by God as a miracle or by demons as witchcraft. It's not hypocrisy, it's caring about the source more than the action.
Having another religion is usually punishable, again not hypocrisy just standard religion.
* According to believers, a set I'm not a member of so I really should stop talking about their business...
Re:Ob. Matrix quote (Score:5, Funny)
You know, there's a real easy way to tell: If when the source is raising the dead, if you hear beautiful and calming and serene music in a major chord mode, then it is good. If you hear banging on a piano or dissonant violins, then evil.
Re:Ob. Matrix quote (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Yes, because there's no real difference between pulling people out of their homes and torturing them to death and making fun of people's ignorance in an online forum.
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No. Absolutely not. Atheists simply demand the same respect as the rest of you fucking nut jobs. It's your right to call Catholics and Atheists nuts. Just like it's my right to say all Christians are nuts. You fucking shitnut freaks are perfectly will to side with an atheist that rants against Islam and then get all fucked up when the atheist turns in your direction.
Re:Ob. Matrix quote (Score:4, Insightful)
No, atheists don't 'demand' anything really. Atheists are generally pretty normal people, just like most people who are religious are normal.
Nutjobs, who also happen to be atheists demand retarded shit just like religous nutjobs, they tend to be more 'scientific nutjobs'. And by that I mean that they seem to worship something they call science instead of religion, yet blindly ignore scientific method in favor of blindly believing what some guy wrote in a book/journal/website.
Same nut jobs, different books, same ignorance, and as you are so quick to show us ... the same name calling and he said she said.
Perhaps before calling someone a 'shitnut freak' for 'ranting against ' a religious group, you should consider not 'ranting against a(ll) religious group(s). Its cool though, you've obviously got plenty of angst to work out, you go on being mad at everyone in the world ... nutjob.
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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
Ahhh science, where one logical theory is considered wrong but another one can be considered right.
Hypocrisy loves science too when you oversimplify like you did with religion.
Re:Ob. Matrix quote (Score:4, Funny)
Turning people into newts.
Hey, he got better.
Re:Ob. Matrix quote (Score:5, Informative)
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we're not talking about some strange, obscure cult here...
I'm not even an atheist and I think Catholicism is indeed a strange, obscure cult.
Re:Ob. Matrix quote (Score:4, Insightful)
The ability for a free human to decide what he does or does not believe is about as far from 'unimportant' as one can possibly get.
You can be insensitive to it if you wish, but this is a thin excuse at best.
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Oh, I disagree completely.
Atheism - "I do not believe there is a god"
Anti-theism - "There is not a god"
The former is within the realm of personal conviction. The latter requires a leap of faith, ergo religion.
The strongest position that a non-religous atheist can produce is something along the lines of "I am not convinced". When you leap to "you are all idiots", you have entered a position that you cannot support with facts.
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I don't think it's a leap to say "I'm not convinced. And your arguments have no foundation." In fact I would assume those who aren't convinced aren't convinced BECAUSE the opposition's arguments have no foundation.
I don't believe there are Unicorns. Ergo I think people who believe in Unicorns are idiots. I'm not anti-unicorns, I've just evaluated the argument made for unicorns (of the mythical magical variety) and found no evidence for it. Since I've found no evidence for it, and exhaustively searched
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Christianity as I understand it, is descended from Catholicism, as Catholicism is descended from Judaism.
Your understanding is incorrect.
The Catholic Church claims the Apostle Peter as its founder. There were, however, ten other Apostles who began the spread of Christianity (Judas, of course, commited suicide instead of seeking redemption, cutting the total to 11 from 12). Within a few hundred years, the Catholic church became the dominant church in Europe, but it was by no means the only Christian church, simply the largest.
It also has the distinction of being one of the oldest Christian denominations. You
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Here is my point. Every fucking time I miss one single infinitesimally insignificant bit of minutia regarding religion somebody's got a tirade of religious bullshit I should understand before I say something. Fuck you(laugh, my use of profanity is generally stylistic). Please understand, that I don't need a bachelors of religious studies to laugh at a joke about the absurdity of some religious practice, I don't care if it's Jews vs Catholics vs Islam. I don't need a fine grained and detailed history of reli
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You sound like a Protestant, and the view you describe is the Protestant view. Catholics are about a billion strong, and believe that the bread and wine really are flesh and blood; it is not "uncommon" in the least. Your statement is like saying the view that God lives on a planet called Kolob is "uncommon", when in fact (as ridiculous as it sounds) it's believed by millions of Mormons. Or that the idea that we're all infected by "body thetans" who give us mental diseases is "uncommon", when all the Scie
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Frankly, I think that they would do a lot better if they started out with a pork roast.
Well then you'd start another holy war over whether or not it's sacrilegious to smother the Host in barbecue sauce.
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On top of all that, the fact that "The Flood" actually has even earlier recorded sources (Sumerian, for example) just make the whole thing even more, well not maybe comical, but at least mildly amusing.
Yes, amazingly almost every culture on earth has a global flood story with a single boat, a bunch of animals and a negotiation of sorts with a god or gods. There are over 200 of them, involving nearly every culture that was on earth in early history.
For instance, this one from China, where the person is even named Ndrao-Ya.
http://www.archives.ecs.soton.ac.uk/miao/songs/TranslatedSongs/m131/m131tr.pdf [soton.ac.uk]
Here's a handy chart to summarize the similarities:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v2/n2/f [answersingenesis.org]
Re:Ob. Matrix quote (Score:5, Funny)
Commit yourself daily to serving The Lord
With some fava beans and a nice Chianti, fthfthfthfth.
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Is Teller God? Should I worship him?
Why don't you ask him yourself?
Because he wouldn't answer you.
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Because he wouldn't answer you.
So like god then?
Re:Ob. Matrix quote (Score:4, Insightful)
Speak for yourself, I can hear God talking all the time in my head.
If only he finally realized I don't understand ancient hebrew...
Re:Ob. Matrix quote (Score:4, Funny)
Humans are a virus!
Before the Matrix, there was Bill Hicks: "I'm tired of this back-slapping 'isn't humanity neat' bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay?"
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Not Bad (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not Bad (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not Bad (Score:4, Informative)
Unless it occurred recently and you're an intermediary state between mutation occurring and the mutation dying out.
Our modern civilization though protects the well being of even those with negative traits who would have otherwise naturally died out. That's not to say evolution in humans has stopped. Instead, we're simply not weeding out the negative traits.
Evolutionary pressure (Score:3, Interesting)
These days, the gray squirrel runs in a straight line when it is in danger. This is probably good news for birds of prey, but
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If my ancestor got a brain virus, and it is still with us, then it most probably is that that virus provided something very positive compared to the negatives that you speak of.
No. All it means is that whatever changes the virus makes, it doesn't greatly affect the ability (means and opportunity) of those who have it to reproduce. Remember, natural selection, the mechanism through which evolution operates, is not working toward a glorious future of perfection, it is a consequence of how adapted an organism is to its environment. If the organism can reproduce just as much with the virus as without, then it's going to stick around even if all it does is sometimes cause schizophre
Useful? (Score:5, Interesting)
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The article doesn't go into much detail, but one type of virus that looked at specifically is a brain virus, definitely interesting implications for mental health research.
Re:Useful? (Score:5, Interesting)
Back with this story [boingboing.net] first came out I remember reading that DNA introduced by virus is thought to have given us the genes that allow the formation of placenta, which gave rise to mammals.
All the articles from around that time seem to be locked away behind paywalls now.
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Mammals (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org]
Re:Mammals (Score:5, Interesting)
ERVs have been known about for some time and are, in fact, one of the "killer" evidences for evolution. You can actually trace lineages with these genes, and they are useful for dating the splits between related lineages. For instance, chimps and humans share more ERVs than, say, humans and baboons. It's difficult to support that observation via Creationism, unless you proclaim the insipid "that's the way God wants it", but evolution explains it very neatly.
Re:Mammals (Score:5, Funny)
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The fact that he finished ahead of schedule seems to support this. Why custom tailor DNA when you can use that whole 7th day to rest?
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"That's the way God ... using copy & paste? If you really think about it...hacked together in 6 days, spaghetti code where 80% seems to be junk that doesn't even do anything, and is incredibly hard to decipher...
So what the Creationists are saying is basically...
God is a either a chump working at Microsoft, or a really bad software contractor who writes Perl?
This sucks, I want a refund.
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"...spaghetti code..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster [wikipedia.org]
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I like to think that God was a smart enough creator and made sure there were plenty of chances for early life to get upgrades along the way. Not that God sprinkled magic viruses on chimps and viola, but rather that's how it worked out given a few hundred-million years of life.
I never quite got how folks think the earth is only 3000 years old and that Dinosaurs never really existed, etc. I'd think it'd be alot easier to explain how creation and evolution fit than deny any evidence of evolution and dinosaurs.
Re:Useful? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Useful? (Score:5, Insightful)
The weird thing is that research is now showing that a lot of the so-called "junk dna" is actually used indirectly. Maybe we like junk food so much because we eat what we are? :-)
But this whole thing isn't all that surprising when you consider where our mitochondria [wikipedia.org] came from.
Re:Useful? (Score:4, Informative)
I remember reading an article about sheep and virii. Some type of sheep use to have a virus that use to be bad for it. Even though this virus was bad, it did have one good attribute. It reduced the chance of a miscarriage and did it better than another "native" gene.
It so happened that this viral infection reduced the chances of miscarriages enough that at some point the virus stopped being bad for the sheep and they had a better chance to reproduce.
Now days, if you neutralize the virus, the sheep will always miscarry since the old gene got silenced/removed in favor for the virus.
The sheep and virus evolved to live together.
I read this a LONG time ago, i think it was in Discovery mag or something, but I can't remember much more than the idea of the story. The details might be slightly off, but the summary is the same. And they did talk as if the virus was still actually living in the host, not just select genes.
Re:Useful? (Score:5, Insightful)
"The viral DNA that isn't conducive to death probably stayed in." -- There, fixed that for you.
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"The viral DNA that isn't conducive to death before reproductive age probably stayed in." -- fixed further?
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Can someone hand this guy an insightful mod? Because it's one of the things we tend to overlook far too easily.
Evolution is not about "survival". It's about passing your genes on. You win the evolution game by having offspring. Whether you survive for long afterwards is only interesting as long as it enhances your offspring's ability to survive and again pass the genes on.
For reference, see a few species that die during intercourse (male only, of course) or shortly after giving birth/laying eggs/whatever el
Re:Useful? (Score:4, Insightful)
Evolution is a very noisy process. It does not assure that we are all maximally fit, only fit enough that all our ancestors managed to reproduce. The boundary of viability is people who are viable, but whose children are not.
Viral DNA might be introduced to our genome as a side-effect of viral infection at a faster rate than natural selection can remove it out of our genome, even if it is harmful to us.
And any benefit from schitzophrenia would have to be so significant as to outweigh the cost of losing touch with reality, which is enormous. Perhaps our DNA code for a randomized process that usually results in a healthy amount of creativity, but sometimes too much. That gene could be preserved even if it is deleterious in outliers. In fact the variability of gene expression ensures that genes advantageous in their mean effect are sometimes less advantageous, i.e. relatively harmful.
Re:Useful? (Score:5, Insightful)
How would they know?
Hero of Alexandria didn't have trains in mind when he made his Aeolipile [wikipedia.org]. It was used as a fancy way to open temple doors. Only much later people figured out a practical use for it.
Boolean algebra was a very obscure branch nobody cared about until it suddenly became very useful.
Lasers, IIRC didn't have an immediate application when they were invented. They definitely didn't have DVD drives in mind.
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In fact, back when lasers were first invented, people referred to them as "a solution looking for a problem". They were so cool, but for a while nobody could think of anything useful to do with them.
Re:Useful? (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, back when lasers were first invented, people referred to them as "a solution looking for a problem". They were so cool, but for a while nobody could think of anything useful to do with them.
Silly folks.
"Insufficient awesome" is the problem, and lasers are the answer.
Re:Useful? (Score:5, Insightful)
I am a pretty smart guy who doesn't understand the utility of pure research.
One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn't belong!
Like my PC (Score:5, Funny)
Bible Code? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bible Code? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you found a scroll in a cave that contained the book of John, would you say that it came from a different source than the book of John in the Bible? That's entirely different from rearranging letters until it says what you want it to say.
Re:Bible Code? (Score:4, Insightful)
If I found a really big scroll in a cave that contained billions and billions of apparently random letters -- but somewhere in the middle of all that was the text of the book of John (or "The Three Little Pigs" or whatever), I MIGHT suspect it came from a different source, yes.
Infinite monkeys pounding on keyboards [wikipedia.org] over an infinite span of time would create the combined works of William Shakespeare, and all that...
Certainly not saying that's what happened here -- but the GPs question/point isn't entirely without merit.
Re:Bible Code? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Bible Code? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not necessarily.
A virus infects a human. It gets to infect the sperm or egg cell. Insignificant part of genetic code gets replaced.
A child is born with -all- its cells containing the virus-originated code.
Of course the replaced part will be several genes at most, but if the mutation is insignificant or positive, it will remain in all the offspring. Meanwhile this may repeat any number of times and will be perpetuated through ages.
If a defect of lacking one whole chromosome is non-lethal (Down's syndrome), a minor damage to your genome has a really good chance of not affecting your offspring at all.
Re:Bible Code? (Score:5, Informative)
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Genesis shows that Genesis is wrong, so you're kind of going the long-way about proving your point.
Within that one book, we have two mutually exclusive stories.
Sequence A: God created all the plants, animals, etc, and then created man 'in his image'
Sequence B: God created the male human, each type of animal, and then the female human
These do not compute, and my suspicion is that 'B' is man's hubris altering the original tale.
Furthermore, there's little in 'A' that precludes evolution, if anything. In fact
Re:Bible Code? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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But now if I hunt someone down and murder them and get diagnosed as a schizo, then I can blame it on the virus in my head that controlled me. Instant "Get-out-of-Jail-Free" card for 1000's of individuals... I wondered how Arnold was gonna cut costs on prisons and focus on Education.... Now it is starting to become clear.
Viral Death: (c) 2010
(Sing it like a thrash punk song!)
Kill Kill Kill
It's what I do best
Kill Kill Kill
It's a viral test
Kill Kill Kill
Now we got a viral fest
I'll Breed inside your Head
unti
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The Creator is actually an infinite number of monkeys?
Not surprising, given how DNA actually works (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a fairly good little video that explains how RNA monomers end up naturally forming into longer polymer chains. Roughly 95% of our DNA is basically crap that only exists because at some point in the past, it was better at copying itself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6QYDdgP9eg
Re:Not surprising, given how DNA actually works (Score:4, Insightful)
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Actually I'm pretty sure 100% of our DNA is basically crap that only exists because at some point in the past it was better at copying itself ;)
Summary and article misleading (Score:3, Informative)
These are endogenous virus fragments. Which means that a virus inserted itself into your ancestor's DNA. So you didn't get this new DNA after you were born, you inherited the 8% viral DNA from your ancestors.
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Re:Summary and article misleading (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
But I use antivirus!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Doesn't Norton protect me from such stuff?
Re:But I use antivirus!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Revelation (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Revelation (Score:5, Interesting)
So the contrast is, an animal, insofar as it thinks, thinks 'I will eat x' and then when x is scarce it thinks 'oh shit there isn't enough x!' Then depending on luck, it dies. Whereas humans think 'I like to eat x' and when x becomes scarce humans think 'well, this sucks, there isn't enough x anymore. Maybe I can eat something else? How about this? Ew. No, not that. How about this other thing? Meh, it's ok. Maybe I can cook it? What things could I do, or do in concert with others, that might restore the natural abundancy of x and/or allow x to be produced in an environment I control?' Yeah. That's why human population keeps growing, moving, adapting, and animals just have to suck it up. They can't solve resource problems creatively.
(Viruses aren't creative either, they and other micro-organisms just have such fast life cycles that it allows them to find mutations that positively affect their survival at a higher rate. In other words they adapt quickly by chance, humans adapt quickly by decisions.
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In fact, there are predators that kill even after they are full, just to kill. I remember watching a documentary about sea turtles and watching them hatch and try to make their way to the sea, and predatory birds were attacking them, first to eat them, but even after that they just kept killing and leaving the dead baby turtles there to rot.
A pure animal whose actions are controlled by evolution of instinct, would stop killing to preserve the food supply. People killed the plains buffaloes just because they liked killing them, and to deny resources for the native Americans.
Of course, there may be a evolutionary advantage for the birds to kill the baby turtles. They might be a common food, and killing extra turtles might reduce competition for that food supply. Alternately, killing the extra baby turtles might actually increase the supply
Either that, or... (Score:2, Funny)
They really need to stop using thier gene sequencers to search for porn.
Poor Summary (Score:5, Interesting)
Which one? (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh wait, the article says "the genomes of humans and other mammals contain DNA derived from the insertion of bornaviruses" plural. My bad.
What a crappy press release (Score:2, Informative)
So 8% of my DNA comes from a virus and not from my ancestors? I guess that means that I was infected with the DNA after conception and for some reason it's not heritable since I didn't get any from my ancestors. The big story, then, is that there is a mechanism that excludes the viral DNA during meiosis.
Dr Feschotte must have cringed when he read the release.
Re:What a crappy press release (Score:5, Insightful)
No, 8% of your DNA comes from viruses that infected your anscestors' reproductive organs and were passed on to you. TFA is actually an interesting read.
Excellent coincidence (Score:2)
I woke up this morning wondering how much of our DNA was influenced by viruses.
Turns out it's 8%.
Thanks, slashdot! :D
Huh (Score:2)
That explains a lot actually.
Fate of us all... (Score:2)
BornAVirus - EndOVirus.
Virus? Hardly. (Score:2)
I'm quite sure that that 8% was merely introduced into our genetic code by an Intelligent Designer, just to throw scientists off the trail a bit.
Who owns the copyright? (Score:2, Insightful)
Considering the necessity of viruses to have some "host-like" code within them, is it not just as possible that viruses got most of their code from hosts rather than vice versa?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
the OA refed in the OP link is in N&V section (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7277/full/463039a.html [nature.com]
That section is mostly commissioned and if not submissions reviewed by editor (technically, not peer reviewed).
The author of the referred N&V article is the author one of the articles in the reference section...
For peer-reviewed article, I would go for:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7277/full/nature08695.html [nature.com]
written by bunch of Japanese:
Endogenous non-retroviral RNA virus elements in mammalian genomes
Damn it. (Score:4, Funny)
A Woman's Perspective (Score:4, Funny)
Misleading title (Score:3, Informative)
The "8% of your genome" comes from the first paragraph of the News and Views article which reviews the actual article by Horie et al, and is referring to ALL viral remnants in the human genome, not just this new Bornavirus one. From a quick scan of the paper, it looks like they didn't estimate what fraction of the human genome comes from their Bornavirus, but they only describe 4 actual elements - so that's a vanishingly small part of the human genome. The vast majority of viral elements in the genome come from retroviruses and other retrotransposons, and that's been known for a long time.
8 Percent! (Score:4, Funny)