What I know about these things is dangerous.....

This is my very first Blogger Post, which will hopefully clone itself to my other journals.

(hopefully for me, not necessarily for any readers I may have.)

ERV stands for Endogenous Retro Virus, basically they're the historical remains of ancient infections which are recorded in the human genome.

But not only on the human genome, but on the genomes of other creatures as well.

Imagine if you will a piece of paper with a building plan on it.

One original.

A drop of water smudges a small part of the plan, you then take that plan and make 10 photostat copies. The smudge is reproduced faithfully 10 times.

The ten copies are then given to 10 people who make amendments, or even damage the plan. These ten people make their own 10 copies (now we have 100) and so on and so forth.

Even when we have trillions of copies, it's posible to trace a path of origin for any given copy based on it history of amendments.

Likewise ERV insertions can be traced back to common ancestors, or rather ERV insertions which are shared by certain species are an indicator of common ancestry.

Which brings us to Humans, Chimps and Orangtutans.

For centuries Chimps have been thought to be mankind's closest living relatives, recently the human and Chimpanzee genome projects have proven that we share in excess of 95% of our genetic material.

Scientists have also compared the Human and Chimp ERV insertion record, and as one would imagine they for the most part agree. It's the differences that are more interesting.

The chimp insertion record shows an infection by PtERV which is not present in humans.

It's a relatively recent infection occuring after humans and Chimps diverged.

What's interesting is that Gorilla genome also shows signs of PrERV infection, but not in the same relative place in their genome as the chimps. Orangutans don't have it.

Now Orangutans are New world Monkeys, which diverged from Old World Monkeys about 20 million years ago, long before Chimps and Humans diverged, so New world monkeys geographiclly seperated, wouldn't actually have been exposed to PtERV.

Human were (we must have been) so why do we (as old World Monkeys) not have evidence of PtERV?

Simply put we were immune.

It's indicative of a difference in our immune process from Chimps.

It may also be why we're vulnerable to another retrovirus doing the rounds : HIV. A similer (very very similer virus has been discovered in Chimps SIV.) It doesn't seem to effect Chimps in the same way as HIV affects humans.

So the conjecture is this, Chimps paid the price early for immunity to SIV, we're paying now for immunity to PtERV.