modified tree of life with virus on it
Ian Mackay of Virology Down Under fame (or notoriety B-) today alerted me to a new paper on the evolution of viruses – which is being touted via press releases as being something that “…adds to evidence that viruses are alive”.
To my mind at least, it does nothing of the sort: what it does do is provide evidence via the medium of comparison of protein folds that “…implies the existence of ancient cellular lineages common to both cells and viruses before the appearance of the “last universal cellular ancestor” that gave rise to modern cells”.
Arshan Nasir and Gustavo Caetano-Anollés took advantage of the fact that protein structure is at least 3 to 10 times more conserved than sequence, and analysed all of the known folds in 5080 organisms, including 3460 viruses. They identified 442 protein folds shared between cells and viruses, and 66 that are unique to viruses – indicating…
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