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EUTHERIA, PLACENTAL MAMMALS. "Placental mammals all bear live young, which are nourished before birth in the mother's uterus through a specialized embryonic organ attached to the uterus wall, the placenta." https://lnkd.in/e3Zwz2F View in LinkedIn

BUDDING PARTICLES. "Electron micrographs of placental tissue from humans and a variety of other animals showed retrovirus-like particles budding from placental cells, particularly within the syncytiotrophoblast layer — the layer consisting of fused cells." https://lnkd.in/e6q2jTP View in LinkedIn

HERVS BUILD PLACENTA. "One could postulate that HERV elements may have a beneficial role in human development. Since retroviral envelope proteins have fusogenic properties, it was assumed that HERV-encoded Env proteins may play a role in the formation of the syncytiotrophoblast layer of the placenta. The hypothesis that Env proteins are involved in syncytiotrophoblast formation has been recently confirmed." http://jvi.asm.org/content/79/1/341.full View in LinkedIn

ERV BENEFITS. "Despite the fact that ERVs have been linked to various diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, cancer and diabetes, the retention of their genes during evolution suggests that they have provided a beneficial role to human survival. In this respect, studies that have highlighted a strong implication of ERV genes in the development and the function of the placenta represent the best example of their beneficial nature." https://lnkd.in/eNxap6v View in LinkedIn

ALIENS IN HUMAN DNA. "The host occasionally takes advantage of the presence of these ancestrally transmitted foreign genomes to serve physiological functions; several possible beneficial effects have been reported, including embryo implantation, gene variability, alternative splicing and polyadenylation, mother’s immunosuppression to protect the fetal allograft, protection against superinfection by exogenous retroviruses, and involvement in development and/or differentiation." https://lnkd.in/eZe8TGB View in LinkedIn

VIRAL GENE CAPTURE BY HOST. "The major sites of syncytin expression are placental syncytiotrophoblasts, multinucleated cells that originate from fetal trophoblasts." https://lnkd.in/e9E9b8u View in LinkedIn

MAMMALIAN ACQUISITIONS. "Here we describe the opposite situation, where a viral gene has been sequestered to serve an important function in the physiology of a mammalian host. This gene, encoding a protein that we have called syncytin, is the envelope gene of a recently identified human endogenous defective retrovirus, HERV-W2." https://lnkd.in/e9E9b8u View in LinkedIn

VIRAL ACQUISITIONS. "Many mammalian viruses have acquired genes from their hosts during their evolution. The rationale for these acquisitions is usually quite clear: the captured genes are subverted to provide a selective advantage to the virus." https://lnkd.in/e9E9b8u View in LinkedIn

PLACENTAL EVOLUTION. "Three distinct mechanisms have been proposed to mediate the evolution of new form, including changes in splicing isoforms, increased transcriptional regulatory complexity, and gene family expansion by duplication and divergence." https://lnkd.in/eN_bZTg View in LinkedIn

DOMESTICATED VIRAL GENES. "The placenta became a site where retroviral genes were ‘domesticated’ to serve adaptive functions in the host, including the manipulation of maternal physiology for the benefit of the fetus." https://lnkd.in/edp9HQZ View in LinkedIn