Belinda Smith

What's next?

Well, I have a story about fossils.

Not the ones that get dug up, but ones that hide in your genome.

You see, over human history, viruses have inserted long strings of DNA into ours.

So what does this ancient viral DNA mean for us today?

And how are koalas helping researchers study these viral fossils?

To find out, I spoke to Desiree Cox from the University of Wollongong.

How human are you in terms of your genome?

That's wild.

Viruses of all things.

You know, you sort of expect it to be something a bit more closer to us in the evolutionary history of life, but viruses are just so different to us.

You know, it's quite amazing that such a large chunk of our genome is viral.

So before we get into how all that viral DNA got into our genome, how do we know that those stretches of DNA came from viruses?

I mean, that does make perfect sense that these stretches of DNA would mutate.

There would be variants within that, like the DNA that is the other 92% of the human genome too.

Okay, so when did all this happen?

Was it when we were single cells swimming around, you know, a warm oceanic broth?

Or does it happen later in human history?

And the process itself of a virus getting its DNA into the genome then allows it to propagate throughout generations.

How does that happen?