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MORE FLEXIBLE. "In contrast to cellular genomes, which are all made of double-stranded DNA, viral DNA genomes are very diverse." https://lnkd.in/dNTbYMw View in LinkedIn

ANCIENT VIRAL RESURRECTION."A 35 Mio-year-old HERV was reconstructed from several defective HERV sequences by deduction of a consensus sequence as infectious virus, designated Phoenix." https://lnkd.in/eGaw2Kq View in LinkedIn

ANCIENT INFECTIONS. "Viruses were already infecting organisms some 300 million years ago, suggests a new study on what may be the oldest date yet for the emergence of an insect-infecting virus." They are considered to have emerged before modern cells. https://lnkd.in/d-szGeg View in LinkedIn

FLU VIRUSES. "Influenza A viruses have caused pandemics in humans during the 20th century, such as ‘‘Spanish Flu’’ caused by the H1N1 virus that killed 25–50 million people worldwide in 1918, ‘‘Asian Flu’’ by the H2N2 virus that killed 1–4 million people in 1957, and ‘‘Hong Kong Flu’’ by the H3N2 virus that killed 0.75–2 million people in 1968. The H1N1 and H3N2 viruses still continue to circulate and cause annual epidemics that kill 0.25–0.5 million people worldwide." https://lnkd.in/d4eZr87 View in LinkedIn

VIRAL DISEASES DATABASE. 128 viral diseases have been characterized. There are undoubtedly numerous more benign chronic infections yet to be found. https://lnkd.in/dhSyxZp View in LinkedIn

GENE TRANSFER. "The very first transformation experiment, described in 1928, showed that dead, disease-producing bacteria could transfer their disease-producing genes to other bacteria following injection into mice." https://lnkd.in/eJ8cwgX View in LinkedIn

VIRUSES ARE US. "The human genome is full of transposable elements (TEs), endogenous viruses and various retroelements, which correspond to almost 50 % of the human genome. Infection of germline cells led to the accumulation of viral genes during evolution and made the human genome a “graveyard” of retroviral fossils." https://lnkd.in/eGaw2Kq View in LinkedIn

EVOLUTION. "Salvador Luria mused about the viral influence on evolution in 1959. “May we not feel,” he wrote, “that in the virus, in their merging with the cellular genome and reemerging from them, we observe the units and process which, in the course of evolution, have created the successful genetic patterns that underlie all living cells?” http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=are-viruses-alive-2004&page=3 View in LinkedIn

SOME CONSENSUS: "eukaryotic genomes have a chimaeric nature: genes for information storage and processing are archaea-related, and genes for metabolic or ‘operational’ processes are mostly bacterial in nature (but not necessarily derived from the mitochondrial progenitor)." https://lnkd.in/dtPERjK View in LinkedIn

"EXPRESSION can be influenced by changes to variable upstream TF binding regions (cis-regulatory elements), by changes to coding sequences that alter protein–protein interactions essential for transcriptional regulation, by changes in heterochromatin location that silence or unsilence expression, or by changes in copy number that result in additional genes that can be coexpressed or subfunctionalized to effect new expression patterns." (TF = transcription factors). https://lnkd.in/dD4GcAS View in LinkedIn