Hundreds of years back some viruses infected our ancestors from that there are nineteen new pieces of DNA are observed. These are found lurking between our genes. Scientists say they found about 50 of the 2500 DNA, which are published today in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.
They may or may not replicate or reproduce is not yet known, but some scientists say people who carry these DNA may get affected. These scientists used some sophisticated techniques to compare these genomes to the reference human genome. They examined the complete strand of DNA or genome from around the world. The researchers made some finding with funding from the National Institute of Health while working at Tufts University and the University of Michigan Medical School.
“This one looks like it is capable of making infectious virus, which would be very exciting if true, as it would allow us to study a viral epidemic that took place long ago, This research provides important information necessary for understanding how retroviruses and humans have evolved together in relatively recent times,” says senior author and virologist John Coffin, Ph.D. of the Tufts University School of Medicine.
“Many studies have tried to link these endogenous viral elements to cancer and other diseases, but a major difficulty has been that we haven’t actually found all of them yet. A lot of the most interesting elements are only found in a small percentage of people, which means you have to screen a large number of people to find them.” says co-first author Zachary H. Williams, a Ph.D. student at the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts University in Boston.
“This is a thrilling discovery,” says co-first author Julia Wildschutte, Ph.D., who began the work as a Ph.D. student in Coffin’s lab at Tufts. “It will open up many doors to research. What’s more, we have confirmed in this paper that we can use genomic data from multiple individuals compared to the reference human genome to detect new HERVs. But this has also shown us that some people carry insertions that we can’t map back to the reference.”