% Ancient Virus Fragments in Our DNA Are Activating Where We Least Expect HEAD TOPICS
Ancient Virus Fragments in Our DNA Are Activating Where We Least Expect
10/21/2022 10:06:00 AM
Ancient Virus Fragments in Our DNA Are Activating Where We Least Expect
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ScienceAlert
Ancient Virus Fragments in Our DNA Are Activating Where We Least Expect
Scattered among the genes passed down from long-gone relatives are scraps of the very viruses that attempted to hijack their bodies. But a new study has found even healthy human tissue contains HML-2 expression."Despite the potential importance of HML-2-modified expression of viral or host genes, to date, HML-2 expression in a non-diseased human body has not been well characterized," researchers from Tufts University
write."Data on HML-2 expression exist in various disease contexts, along with evidence of expression in some non-diseased tissues, but examination of all tissues in a host has yet to be performed."To remedy that, researchers at Tufts analyzed 54 types of non-diseased tissue from 948 human donors.
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Oliver Taylor Member
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They found HML-2 transcripts in every single tissue type they analyzed, although some types contained more transcripts than others. Read more: ScienceAlert » Dozens of ancient viruses are 'switched on' in healthy cells throughout our bodies Siberian cave reveals glimpse into first known Neanderthal family The Black Death triggered 'a form of Darwinian evolution' that gave rise to modern immunity, suggests new study Will a Nobel Prize Make Paleogenomics More Accountable?
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Nathan Chen Member
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Home sales in the US declined for the eighth month in a row in September as surging mortgage rates and high prices pushed buyers out of the market. Read more >> Dozens of ancient viruses are 'switched on' in healthy cells throughout our bodiesSnippets of ancient viruses are embedded in the human genome and active in many healthy tissues.
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Ethan Thomas 7 minutes ago
Siberian cave reveals glimpse into first known Neanderthal familyAncient DNA from closely related in...
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Daniel Kumar 11 minutes ago
The Black Death triggered 'a form of Darwinian evolution' that gave rise to modern immunity,...
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Mia Anderson Member
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Siberian cave reveals glimpse into first known Neanderthal familyAncient DNA from closely related individuals offers fresh insight into Neanderthals’ lives and social structures. Thank you so much, Rebecca!
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Natalie Lopez 4 minutes ago
The Black Death triggered 'a form of Darwinian evolution' that gave rise to modern immunity,...
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Elijah Patel Member
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The Black Death triggered 'a form of Darwinian evolution' that gave rise to modern immunity, suggests new studyIE speaks with Prof. Barreiro who, along with colleagues, analyzed ancient DNA samples taken from people who passed away before, during, and after The Black Death.
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Sofia Garcia 4 minutes ago
The ending makes zero sense. Covid deaths are nearly all among people that were past their reproduct...
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Harper Kim 13 minutes ago
Will a Nobel Prize Make Paleogenomics More Accountable?NEW on SAPIENS: 'As an archaeologist, I s...
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Victoria Lopez Member
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The ending makes zero sense. Covid deaths are nearly all among people that were past their reproduction age so that has no impact in evolution. Not to mention that 6M out of 8B is a small % and that we don’t even know what % is with/for covid.
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Luna Park 9 minutes ago
Will a Nobel Prize Make Paleogenomics More Accountable?NEW on SAPIENS: 'As an archaeologist, I s...
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Lucas Martinez 4 minutes ago
In light of these findings, scientists have proposed using HML-2 expression as a biomarker for disea...
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Daniel Kumar Member
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Will a Nobel Prize Make Paleogenomics More Accountable?NEW on SAPIENS: 'As an archaeologist, I see the aDNA “revolution” as usefully disrupting our practice. It prompts the archaeological community to reevaluate where ancestral skeletal collections come from and should rest'
Myles Turner Expected To Miss At Least One Week With Sprained AnkleMyles Turner Expected To Miss At Least One Week With Sprained Ankle - RealGM Wiretap
in breast cancers, melanoma, and teratomas.Traces of ancient viruses are littered throughout the human genome, embedded within the DNA's structure.3 .of ancient genomic data published in Nature today (Oct .
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Daniel Kumar 23 minutes ago
In light of these findings, scientists have proposed using HML-2 expression as a biomarker for disea...
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Evelyn Zhang 10 minutes ago
"Fifteen or 20 years ago, it was largely thought that almost all of these endogenous retrovirus...
In light of these findings, scientists have proposed using HML-2 expression as a biomarker for diseased tissue. But a new study has found even healthy human tissue contains HML-2 expression.
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Isaac Schmidt 4 minutes ago
"Fifteen or 20 years ago, it was largely thought that almost all of these endogenous retrovirus...
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Henry Schmidt 13 minutes ago
To study the cave’s inhabitants in greater depth, a team of researchers led by palaeogeneticist La...
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Lucas Martinez Moderator
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"Fifteen or 20 years ago, it was largely thought that almost all of these endogenous retroviruses that are in the genome — there's thousands of them — most of them in normal tissue are silenced," said Matthew Bendall (opens in new tab), an assistant professor of computational biology research in medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, who was not involved in the study. "Despite the potential importance of HML-2-modified expression of viral or host genes, to date, HML-2 expression in a non-diseased human body has not been well characterized," researchers from Tufts University write .
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Andrew Wilson Member
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To study the cave’s inhabitants in greater depth, a team of researchers led by palaeogeneticist Laurits Skov and population geneticist Benjamin Peter at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, extracted DNA from 17 other ancient-human remains from Chagyrskaya, as well as several from a nearby cave, called Okladnikov. "Data on HML-2 expression exist in various disease contexts, along with evidence of expression in some non-diseased tissues, but examination of all tissues in a host has yet to be performed." This assumption has been challenged in the last six years or so, as scientists developed more sensitive methods of studying gene activation, Bendall told Live Science." To remedy that, researchers at Tufts analyzed 54 types of non-diseased tissue from 948 human donors.
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Hannah Kim 39 minutes ago
pestis, eliminated between 30% and 50% of the population Between 1346 and 1350, Yersinia pestis (Y. ...
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Henry Schmidt Member
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pestis, eliminated between 30% and 50% of the population Between 1346 and 1350, Yersinia pestis (Y. They found HML-2 transcripts in every single tissue type they analyzed, although some types contained more transcripts than others. The new study, published Tuesday (Oct.
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Oliver Taylor 18 minutes ago
When Skov started comparing the genomes from Chagyrskaya, he got the surprise of his career. Levels ...
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Jack Thompson 14 minutes ago
In these tissues, 19 and 17 proviruses respectively were expressed. "This study is really one o...
When Skov started comparing the genomes from Chagyrskaya, he got the surprise of his career. Levels of the proviral proteins were particularly high in the cerebellum, which sits at the back of the brain, and in the testes.
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Harper Kim Member
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In these tissues, 19 and 17 proviruses respectively were expressed. "This study is really one of the first looks at what is happening in normal tissue," Bendall said.
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Ryan Garcia 36 minutes ago
The thyroid also contained a high number of proviral remnants, as did the pituitary gland, which is ...
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Audrey Mueller 23 minutes ago
Many of the proviruses identified by researchers in healthy tissue had been damaged by mutations or ...
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Evelyn Zhang Member
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The thyroid also contained a high number of proviral remnants, as did the pituitary gland, which is a bean-shaped structure in your brain that produces hormones. This differed between the male and female, suggesting that they were father and daughter.
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Natalie Lopez 4 minutes ago
Many of the proviruses identified by researchers in healthy tissue had been damaged by mutations or ...
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Brandon Kumar 7 minutes ago
But some remained intact. The functional consequences of this discovery are unclear, but the finding...
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Sebastian Silva Member
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Many of the proviruses identified by researchers in healthy tissue had been damaged by mutations or deletions over time." Related: How does DNA know which job to do in each cell? The new research pulled data from the Genotype Tissue and Expression (GTEx) project, a database that includes tissue samples taken after death from nearly 950 individuals. Mortality rates dropped during future plague outbreaks over the following 400 years, which may have been due to altered cultural customs or pathogen evolution.
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Noah Davis Member
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But some remained intact. The functional consequences of this discovery are unclear, but the findings have important clinical implications nonetheless. To build the database, researchers analyzed these tissues to see which of their genes were switched"on," as evidenced by the presence of specific strands of RNA within their cells.
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Audrey Mueller 40 minutes ago
Heteroplasmies usually vanish after a few generations, says Skov, so the three probably lived around...
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Mia Anderson 16 minutes ago
Some RNA molecules fulfill other roles in the cell, including helping to build those new proteins or...
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Mason Rodriguez Member
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Heteroplasmies usually vanish after a few generations, says Skov, so the three probably lived around the same time. If HML-2 transcripts are to be used as a biomarker of disease, then they need to be measured against a background expression in healthy tissue as well. Otherwise, it might look like all tissue is diseased.
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Chloe Santos Moderator
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Some RNA molecules fulfill other roles in the cell, including helping to build those new proteins or switching genes"on" and"off. "We have found that nearly all normal human tissues express, in their RNA, one or another of about three dozen endogenous proviruses, remnants of widespread retrovirus infection of our distant ancestors," explains virologist John Coffin. “It is a little glimpse into a Neanderthal family.
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Lucas Martinez Moderator
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The samples were dated using historical records and radiocarbon dating. "We expect this finding to provide a basis for further studies to understand the role of these elements in human biology and disease.
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William Brown 15 minutes ago
Specifically, they screened for a group of HERVs called"HML-2," which was introduced to th...
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Sophia Chen Member
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Specifically, they screened for a group of HERVs called"HML-2," which was introduced to the human lineage relatively recently — at least by evolutionary standards." The HML-2 group of HERVs is composed of numerous, closely related proviruses, but each one of these viruses is unique and may have acquired different mutations while in the human genome. Researchers at Tufts are keen to explore the functional consequences of each, but it will require painstaking research.
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Brandon Kumar 12 minutes ago
The authors found evidence of active HML-2 viruses in all 54 non-diseased tissue types in the GTEx d...
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Natalie Lopez Member
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The authors found evidence of active HML-2 viruses in all 54 non-diseased tissue types in the GTEx database, but they found the highest levels of activation in the cerebellum, situated just behind the brainstem; the pituitary gland, a pea-size structure at the base of the brain that churns out hormones; the thyroid gland in the neck, which helps regulate metabolism; and the testis. Researchers have uncovered similar patterns in mountain gorillas, which typically live in communities of fewer than 20 individuals, and other threatened species.
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Lucas Martinez 56 minutes ago
Judging from the results of the current study, it seems older proviruses tend to be expressed in the...
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Natalie Lopez 10 minutes ago
("Provirus" refers to a remnant of viral genetic material embedded in the genome. During t...
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Sophia Chen Member
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Judging from the results of the current study, it seems older proviruses tend to be expressed in the human genome more. That suggests younger proviruses might have their expression suppressed, possibly because they present more of a threat.
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Dylan Patel 20 minutes ago
("Provirus" refers to a remnant of viral genetic material embedded in the genome. During t...
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Audrey Mueller Member
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("Provirus" refers to a remnant of viral genetic material embedded in the genome. During this investigation, one of the four variants was linked to the control of Y. Older proviruses have had more time to mutate and might even have contributed some biological advantages, which might have been selected for over time.
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Sofia Garcia Member
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Modelling from the team suggests that the patterns observed in genetic diversity would occur if more than half of women in small communities were born elsewhere. But that's just an idea. "Why is the cerebellum different from the cortex? I think that's kind of an open question," Bendall said.
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Ryan Garcia 28 minutes ago
For now, the authors the"role of HERVs in human biology is still largely a mystery.&quo...
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Mason Rodriguez Member
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For now, the authors the"role of HERVs in human biology is still largely a mystery." The study was published in . When HERVs are switched on, the viral fragments don't give rise to whole, functional viruses capable of infecting cells, Bendall noted. This makes Lalueza-Fox wonder whether it was mobile Neanderthal women who encountered — and mated with — Homo sapiens in other parts of Eurasia.