Einstein International Postdoctoral Fellow Amr Aswad, the virologist Benedikt Kaufer and an international group of co-authors published their latest findings on the ancient zoonotic disease herpes and the evolution of its genome in a paper for Molecular Biology and Evolution. Their study investigated the evolutionary history of the endogenous Human Herpesvirus 6 (HHV-6), which they showed has been integrating in our genomes since before the human migration out of Africa.
All living things pass their genes from parent to offspring. However, for around 1% of humans – roughly 80 million people – a herpesvirus is lurking amidst their genes, being inherited from one generation to the next. Under normal circumstances, viruses infect the cells of our body where they reproduce and spread from person to person, through bodily fluids for example.
In the case of human herpesvirus 6, the virus has instead integrated into the genome of a sperm or egg cell, resulting in offspring that have the…
