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Living fossil or evolving virus?
Author(s) -
Tomonaga Keizo
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
embo reports
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 4.584
H-Index - 184
eISSN - 1469-3178
pISSN - 1469-221X
DOI - 10.1038/embor.2010.59
Subject(s) - virus , biology , genome , viral evolution , virology , evolutionary biology , genetics , gene
Forty million years ago, Bornavirus integrated DNA fragments of itself into the human genome. The modern virus remains strikingly similar to these fragments suggesting that it might preserve the features of the ancestral virus, perhaps even unlocking the secrets of viral origins and evolution.