From The Telegraph:
The human genome is littered with sequences left behind from long-ago viral infections but now scientists have found the code is still active
Now researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine have found that genetic material from a retrovirus called HERV-H is not only active, but is crucial in allowing a fertilised human egg to grow into an embryo.
…
“What’s really interesting is that these sequences are found only in primates, raising the possibility that their function may have contributed to unique characteristics that distinguish humans from other animals.
Let’s back up and be cautious here. For one thing, many primates are not particularly clever, so we need to be much more specific about why it worked (if it did) so well in the human, and not especially in the tarsier. And the way things have been going, the same sequence or a very similar one could turn up in the opossum, but no one has looked. Who knew the water bear shared so many genes with unrelated life forms?
“We’re starting to accumulate evidence that these viral sequences, which originally may have threatened the survival of our species, were co-opted by our genomes for their own benefit.” More.
But we don’t know that either, do we? HERV-H could once have been a useless or even useful parasite that somehow got incorporated into the system.
Question: What were fertilised human eggs doing, to grow into embryos, before HERV-H was available? Or are we to assume it always was available, for all humans? Stay tuned.
See also: Horizontal gene transfer: Sorry, Darwin, it’s not your evolution any more
and This just in: One sixth of water bear’s genes are from microbes Researcher: More than 90 percent of these come from bacteria, but others come from archaea (a distinct group of microbes), fungi, and even plants. “The number of them is pretty staggering,” he says.
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Well, an opossum genome is available here, first published in 2007. If it is true that no one has looked, despite Dr Sebastiano’s clear statement that the sequences are found only in primates, then that would be quite an oversight on his part.
Good point, daveS, but new stuff is turning up every day now. Dr.Sebastiano probably does not know that the sequence turns up only in primates. Many life forms are still being discovered, let alone mapped. At least we will know something, either way.
News:
This is extremely good. It is a very definite support to my model that retrotransposons are a modeling tool of biological design.
Here, the role of a specific lincRNA, HPAT5, of retrotransposon origin, is clearly shown and analyzed, and it acts as a regulatory element in a very complex epigenetic network, including miRNAs.
Just a simple clue: when we find “co-opted” in a darwinist fairy tale, we can safely read: “designed”.
News: Question: What were fertilised human eggs doing, to grow into embryos, before HERV-H was available? Or are we to assume it always was available, for all humans?
It’s not untypical to network evolution for something that once played a minor role to then become essential.
@4
The usual unsubstantiated balderdash from Zach.
Unguided Darwinian evolution cannot even explain the origin of a single gene/protein by unguided material processes, much less how a sequence becomes ‘essential’ so early in embryonic development.
Virolution
“The most important evolutionary book since Dawkins’ Selfish Gene.”
This sort of supports my pet theory that the Designer used viruses as tools for genetic engineering and maintenance. And that viral diseases are rogue viruses that used to have important maintenance functions but their rna degraded and they could no longer fulfill their designed purpose.
gpuccio,
I see that you already have a more sophisticated version of my idea.
Collin:
Glad that I am not alone!
We are already a group, although very small… 🙂
Only primates have ERV’s? Don’t other animals get viral infections?
From the paper:
“Recent studies have catalogued more than 10.000 lincRNAs in the human genome, and have found that TEs are present in more than two-thirds of mature linc RNA transcripts, thus contributing to lineage specific diversification of vertebrate lincRNA repertories.”
More than two-thirds!
From the paper:
Emphasis mine.
Glossary:
complex regulatory mechanisms = tons of functional complexity
“recycled” = designed
introduced and modified = shaped by a design process
to confer = the purpose of the designer
aarceng:
HERV = Human Endogenous Retro Virus
Check out the Baranome Hypothesis and the VIGE-first hypothesis:
http://creation.com/images/pdf.....05-112.pdf
Peer:
Thank you for the link. Interesting.
From an ID point of view, the important thing is that transposable elements act as design tools. That’s the point. It is certainly interesting to understand if they start as viruses or as integrated components of the genome. But the crucial point is: they are tools for guided variation.
The important point is: functional information in the genome arises in the course of natural history as a result of conscious design.
If the methodology of implementation is guided variation, as it seems ever more likely, then it is also likely that the variation we are discussing is not so much apparently random but guided mutation in the course of replication, as in the traditional neo darwinian idea, but rather apparently random but guided activity of transposons. That’s a big difference, indeed!