Quote of the Day | 1210
Aris Katzourakis of the University of Oxford has tallied up all of the invasions of retroviruses into the genomes of our ancestors. His latest total is 31. Each of those invasions may well have caused a devastating outbreak akin to what retroviruses are doing to koalas today—perhaps spreading an immune-crushing cancer that nearly brought our early primate ancestors to extinction.
Eventually, these outbreaks ended, and the viruses became trapped in their hosts. But they didn’t lose all their viral powers.
‘What koalas can teach us about human evolution and disease.’
[x]#10554 fan maandag 10 december 2012 @ 15:00:09
