Comments on: Meet your viral ancestors – how bornaviruses have been infiltrating our genomes for 40 million years

By: Dormant viruses can hide in our DNA and be passed from parent to child | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine

Sat, 27 Mar 2010 17:02:28 +0000

[...] Meet your viral ancestors – how bornaviruses have been infiltrating our genomes for 40 million… [...]

By: steve

steve — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 22:51:23 +0000

Thank you, Ed, for another well written article. I struggled with some of the comments, but overall this was made very accessible. Well done!

By: Art

Art — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 02:41:15 +0000

Add: Though I do know Hep B has reverse transcriptase, but it’s a DNA virus and not an RNA virus like retroviruses.
Also, regarding Gram positive and negative bacteria, it’s to indicate if they stain with Gram staining. Positive stains, negative doesn’t.

By: Art

Art — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 02:27:24 +0000

Isn’t Hep B an hepadnaviridae and not a retrovirus?

By: mo

mo — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:13:35 +0000

oops. That awesome document says LINEs are also ERVs.
I thought they were more ancestral.

By: Ed Yong

Ed Yong — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 11:50:32 +0000

Murfomurf – they’re around 360 amino acids long. So just over 1,000 DNA letters. You find them by taking the viral seqeunces and searching the human genome/proteome for matches.
DD – speciation? Not sure, but check out this awesome document for more on retroviral influence on human evolution, including the placental stuff that Nathan mentions.
Carey – nope. Mitochondria are ex-bacteria that have been captured by complex cells. These are viruses.

By: Carey

Carey — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 11:03:14 +0000

Are mitochondria related in any way to this category? Carey Rowland, author of Glass Chimera

By: mo

mo — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 10:45:08 +0000

positive/negative is just to indicate polarity. Because positive and negative is a construction of human languages to identify polarities, there are no “real” positive and negative values in nature, as there are no real negative amounts of anything, anywhere (can you imagine a basket with -5 apples in it? If you add +5 apples, there are zero apples in the basket). Just polarities.
Simple polarities can arise fairly easy in evolution, as when a new character arises this one individuum has the character, while the others don’t have it. Gram+/- is a simple polarity like that. RNA and DNA are other types of polarity, as they are complimentary.
Charges are also polar. I’m not a physicist, but I don’t think that negative charges are the “more negative than zero” absence of positive charges, but just that a negative charge has the opposite behavior in a electric field than a same amount of positive charge.
In my post above, I wanted to write
“Positive RNA viruses package positive RNA into their viral particles, while negative RNA viruses package *negative* RNA into particles.”
obviously.

By: Nathan Myers

Nathan Myers — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 08:11:06 +0000

DD: These other +/- have nothing to do with one another or with RNA, never mind antimatter flux. I gather that retroviruses were intimately involved in the transition to placental pregnancy; live birth ought to qualify as a sort of behavioral change.

By: DD

DD — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 07:13:44 +0000

Awfully complicated stuff! Is there some connection between gram positive/negative bacteria and positive/negative viruses, and rH positive/negative blood type, and pH positive/negative, beyond the obvious polarity? I’d guess not. I wonder if retroviruses have ever induced speciation due to behavioral changes in part of the population.