She gets to live in Marty's Postapocalyptic World Fallout Shelter.
She doesn't.
Posted on 04/10/2007 12:26:31 PM PDT by LibWhacker
Science Daily — Retroviruses have been around longer than humanity itself. In fact, the best-known family member, HIV, is a relative youngster, with its first known human infections occurring sometime in the mid-20th century.
But although many retroviruses went extinct hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago, researchers studying the pathogens don’t use the traditional tools of paleontologists: They need look only as far as our own DNA. Retroviruses infect cells and replicate by inserting their DNA into their host cell’s genome. If that cell happens to be a germ cell, such as a sperm, an egg or their precursors, then the retroviral DNA is inherited by offspring just like a normal gene. Humans have many defunct retroviruses deposited in our DNA, remnants of ancient retroviruses that replicated in our ancestors millions of years ago. Now, researchers have brought one of those retroviruses back to life.
“In our DNA, there’s a fossil record of retroviruses that used to infect us,” says Paul Bieniasz, associate professor and head of the Laboratory of Retrovirology at Rockefeller University and the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center. In fact, about eight percent of human DNA is made up of retroviral sequences. Bieniasz and Youngnam Lee, a graduate student in the Bieniasz lab, have excavated some of that DNA and — in an attempt to better understand how humans and retroviruses co-evolved — they have resurrected an ancient retrovirus, one that can create new viral particles and infect human cells. They describe their work in a paper published by PLoS Pathogens last month.
The extinct retroviruses embedded in our DNA can’t reproduce because of mutations in one or more of their genes. The younger of these human endogenous retroviruses (or HERVs) have fewer changes, and judging by the paucity of genetic alterations, at least one subfamily — HERV-K — was likely still active less than a few hundred thousand years ago. Different members of this subfamily have slightly different mutations. “But as of a few months ago,” Bieniasz says, “there was no replication-competent form of this virus.”
To eliminate those mutations that kept HERV-K from replicating, the two researchers deduced a genetic sequence that was a consensus of 10 different HERV-K proviruses and synthesized the whole viral genome from scratch. Then, they took that sequence (which they dubbed HERV-KCON) and inserted it into cultured human cells to see if it would result in the creation of HERV-K structural proteins. Their consensus sequence resulted in not only functional proteins, but in a retrovirus that was capable of creating new viral particles and integrating itself into a host cell’s genome. “This is the first time this has been done with a viral genome that was effectively dead, and now is alive — or at least has all the functions that suggest it should replicate,” Bieniasz says.
The project began, Lee says, because certain human and non-human primate cells produce proteins that appear to block HIV from replicating. “And the question is where did the proteins come from?” she asks. “By studying these extremely old viruses, we can tap into what happened in our ancestors millions and millions of years ago.”
How long before this science thread will be hidden in General Chat?
Now here’s a brilliant idea... let’s take a retrovirus that all of humanity existing today is here because of a mutation that keeps the virus from working....
and rework it to once again be active.
You took the words right out of my mouth:
“By studying these extremely old viruses, we can tap into what happened in our ancestors millions and millions of years ago.”
Or maybe we can tap into what happened TO our ancestors millions and millions of years ago.
And pestilence was unleashed upon the world, not through a pale rider on a horse, but with the sound of breaking glass in a laboratory somewhere in New Jersey, and a single word:
“Oops!”
> “Oops!”
Same image that occurred to me when they set about resurrecting the 1918 superflu a couple years ago.
[shiver]
“Not to OUR ancestors... OUR ancestors had the mutation that kept it from working ;)”
Not necessarily.
There were probably lots of orphans, who are our ancestors, left behind who managed to muttate, while their parents and grandparents, also our ancestors, bought the farm.
Except that there weren’t any farms back then.
Hey, I’ve got a good idea!
Reactivate these old retros, be sure to program and test the antidote and make a bunch of it, inoculate yourself with the antidote, and go break a vial somewhere like, oh, maybe Baghdad.
Sure, it’s MEAN to kill 6 billion people just to get all their toys, but hey, you’ve gotta break some eggs to make an omelette, right?
This sounds like a script from a bad sci-fi movie.......
Gosh I hate it when a single posts causes me to slow down from wreaking havoc all over Free Republic.
I had to read your here at least 4 times in order to "get' what you are saying.
There were plenty of farms back then. They just were not being managed well.
The Hunter Gatherers had no chance against the farmers, because they simply could not maintain their own support system while always being "on the road" so to speak.
The farms were few and far between for a while, but as we all know, they were more efficient, and more importantly something did not come from nothing!
Now you can read my post a few times in order to figure out just what I am saying.
The Andromeda strain.
I’ll volunteer for the Alcoholic part.........
I got it at once.
Except if you go back and look at the original article, they’re resurrecting retro-viruses from 100,000 years ago and more. The agricultural revolution was 8000 years ago, maybe 10,000 years tops.
I seriously doubt there were any farms anywhere outside of anthills 100,000 years ago.
If men did figure out agriculture that long ago, relative to everyone else figuring it out, I figure we would either all be speaking one language under one government, or have already reached Alpha Centauri by now.
Ok, which part of this is a good idea?
She gets to live in Marty's Postapocalyptic World Fallout Shelter.
She doesn't.
Ping for later read. I have to go to #1 Son’s gymnastics meet.
Heh ...
A line by Vincent Price, the mad scientist in the movie, "The Tingler" ...
"It's a new, experimental drug called lysergic acid diathylamide"
Rent the movie ... it's there.
These guys sucked a partial virus out of human DNA and repaired the damage.
The Jurassic Park guys sucked partial dinosaur DNA out of a mosquito and repaired the damage.
Since we know that HERV sequences inherited via DNA are the result of a specific infection in a specific individual that against all odds was trasmitted to offspring, all these HERV sequences common between various species are hard proof of human evolution.
We are immune to all these old viruses and have incorporated them into our DNA code so really they are part of us and cannot infect us again.
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