Koalas are susceptible to cancers such as lymphoma and leukemia along with chlamydia infections due to koala retrovirus, a pathogen that began inserting itself into the koala genome about 40,000 years ago and is continuing to do so. A paper published in Cell yesterday (October 10) identifies an innate immune response in koalas infected with KoRV.
Viral DNA makes up about 8 percent of the human genome—but these insertions happened in our primate ancestors millions of years ago, so far back in evolutionary history that scientists haven’t been able to watch the process unfold in an animal before, reports STAT.
“What [koalas] are going through is the process of what’s driven the evolution of every animal on the planet,” William Theurkauf, a geneticist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and lead author of the study, tells The New York Times. For example, he says, a gene necessary for the ...
