A Planet of Viruses by Zimmer Carl

Author:Zimmer, Carl [Zimmer, Carl]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2011-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

Proteins like APOBEC3 disable endogenous retroviruses, but they don’t eliminate them. Over millions of years, our genomes have picked up a vast amount of DNA from dead viruses. Each of us carries almost a hundred thousand fragments of endogenous retrovirus DNA in our genome, making up about 8 percent of our DNA. To put that figure in perspective, consider that the twenty thousand protein-coding genes in the human genome make up only 1.2 percent of our DNA. Scientists have also observed millions of smaller pieces of “jumping DNA” in the human genome. It’s possible that many of those pieces evolved from endogenous retrovirus, having been stripped down to the bare essentials required for copying DNA.

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