The Human Genome is a Battlefield
Charles Johnson
Fri Sep 5, 2008 at 1:59 pm PDT • Views: 209
David Brown has a good piece in the Washington Post’s Science section, on the remnants of extinct viruses discovered in the genome—the results of evolutionary warfare between viral invaders and human genes: In Our Genes, Old Fossils Take On New Roles.
Over the past 15 years, scientists have been comparing the inherited genetic material — the genomes — of dozens of organisms, acquiring a life history of life itself. What they’re finding would impress even novelist William Faulkner, the great chronicler of how the past never really goes away.
It turns out that about 8 percent of the human genome is made up of viruses that once attacked our ancestors. The viruses lost. What remains are the molecular equivalents of mounted trophies, insects preserved in genomic amber, DNA fossils.
The thousands of human endogenous retroviruses, or HERVs, sketch a history of rough times during the 550 million years of vertebrate evolution. The best-preserved one, HERV-K113, probably arrived less than 200,000 years ago, long after human beings and chimpanzees diverged from a common ancestor.
But these retroviruses are more than just curiosities. They are some of the most important enemies we ever had. They helped mold the immune system that is one of the evolutionary marvels of life on Earth.
In the past two years, a laboratory in France and another in the United States independently reconstructed a functioning HERV-K retrovirus from pieces found in the human genome. This summer, both showed that the gene sequences of some of those viruses bear the characteristic fingerprints of APOBEC3, a human enzyme that mutated them into submission.
Frank says: