February
16
/ 2024
A new study has unraveled a mystery that is key to understanding the course of human and animal evolution. A team of genetic researchers from Altos Labs at the Cambridge Institute of Science in the United Kingdom explain how infection by an incredibly ancient form of retrovirus jumpstarted the process of animal evolution. The Science Linking Retrovirus to Evolution When retroviruses infect an organism, they will invade that organism’s cellular DNA and plant their own genetic material inside of it. The host organism’s genome may then begin to function differently, possibly causing that organism and its offspring to develop some entirely new characteristics. In the study just published in the journal Cell, scientists reported their discovery of a section of
