Desiree Cox

So there are some viral sequences that we can detect that joined us millions and millions of years ago while we were still, you know, not necessarily human.

So while we had a common ancestor with lots of other things.

In contrast, there are also some sequences that have joined us much more recently.

So we think that they joined our genome millions of years ago, some of them, when we had a common ancestor with things like

chimpanzees for example so there are some of these viral sequences in our genome that we actually share with chimpanzees and we as humans do have some endogenous retroviral sequences that are unique to us that we don't share with any other organisms along the tree of life so this process is happening all the time

It's actually really interesting and a bit of a fluke.

So it's not just a case of the virus having to get into our genome.

It's specific cells in which that has to happen for it to be able to become integrated into our genome and sort of passed along to our offspring.

So if that process were to happen, if that integration were to happen in cells in our skin or our muscle tissue, that wouldn't necessarily make it into the human genome as a whole because it wouldn't be passed on to our offspring.

In contrast, if it happens in cells in our reproductive organs, then it can be passed on to our offspring and suddenly it becomes part of the human genome.

This is, I guess, the heart of my research.

So we have a couple of domains that we know that viral sequences found in our genome can contribute to, and they can be both positive and negative.

So, for example, there are some viral sequences that have been associated with diseases like cancer or neurodegenerative diseases like motor neuron disease.

And of course, that's what my team at UOW works on is understanding how certain viral sequences might be contributing to motor neuron disease.

So, for example, when those sequences get turned into protein.

So this is essentially if we think about the sequence as an instruction manual, then eventually our cells turn that into the machinery that the cells need.

And so these sequences, these viral sequences, could be being made into machinery and that might be toxic to some of our human cells, like our neurons, which are specialised cells in the brain that are lost in motor neuron disease.

Absolutely.

So one of the most fascinating examples for me is actually we owe mammalian pregnancy to a protein that came from a virus that integrated

So there's a protein called syncytin-1.