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How do you know a retrovirus?
In "Why evolution is true," Jerry Coyne claims that one evidence of evolution is the presence of retroviruses in the human genome.
I appreciate the power of that argument, but Coyne doesn't explain how we know that a particular piece of the human genome originated as a retrovirus. What tips us off?
3 Answers
- 1 decade agoFavorite Answer
If you're up for a bit of reading, you would probably find the paper I'm linking pretty interesting.
The most relevant bit is:
"Genome sequencing reveals that 8% of the human genome consists of human endogenous retroviruses, or HERVs, and, if we extend this to HERV fragments and derivatives, the retroviral legacy amounts to roughly half our DNA. Although many HERVs have been degraded into fragments, they are still readily identifiable from the presence of any of three pathognomonic genes, gag, pol and env, and their flanking long terminal repeats or LTRs."
This tells you that they are mostly easily identified by the presence of specific viral genes. The article goes into more detail about these genes further down.
- Anonymous1 decade ago
The reverse-translated rna sequence can be detected. This means reverse-translated promoter sequences, etc.