Despiteover 36 million peopleworldwide living with HIV , and over 2 million new infection occurring every single year , surprisingly piddling is known about its deep evolutionary line of descent . Understandably , much interest since its find in 1981 has focused on how the disease infects people and parry their immune system , but a team of research worker decided tosee how far backthey could hound its origin .
They detect that while previously HIV ’s oldest - known linage go steady back to at most 12 million years ago , they uncovered evidence that this was far short of its actual evolutionary origin , and that the class of computer virus to which HIV belongs is far more ancient than anyone had postulated , date back as betimes as 60 million years ago . The grounds of this long story has been hiding in the genome of a little known creature call a colugo , also known as a vaporize lemur , although it neither fly nor is a lemur .
HIV is a character of virus known as a lentivirus , which is subdivided five time depending on the character of animal they infect : primates , sheep and Goat , horses , cats , and cattle . Lentiviruses are a genus of retroviruses , which stand for the virus contains RNA that when infecting a prison cell is transcribed into DNA and integrated into the host cell ’s own genome . From this , the cell then boil out the viral proteins as it would any other , which make it foxy for the immune system to place as an infected cell . When the computer virus has done its thing , the cell will eventually burst , vote out itself and expel many more homemade virus to infect more cubicle .
But it also stand for that number of the viral DNA can get trapped and stay on within the horde animate being ’s deoxyribonucleic acid , which can afterwards get extend on from coevals to generation . In fact , it is thought that prominent portions of our deoxyribonucleic acid is made up of remainder of old viral DNA , in what is screw as “ endogenous retrovirus . " Within these , research worker from the Czech Academy of Sciences look at lentiviruses found in the Malayan vanish lemur .
By using genetic analysis , they found that the morsel of lentiviruses still present in the colugo DNA in all likelihood found their agency in at least 21 - 40 million years ago , but that because the same bits of viral DNA were present in all go colugo specie – the last common ancestor of which lived 60 million twelvemonth ago – the viral DNA was likely incorporate by at least that point . Their employment is published inMolecular Biology and Evolution .
This pushes the history of the computer virus much further back than anyone had thought . The research worker next want to widen their lookup , and wait at other groups of animal to see if they can obtain any other evidence of the disease hide out within them .
