Desiree Cox

This is a piece of machinery that in cells of the placenta actually allows these cells to fuse together.

And that's a really crucial step for mammalian pregnancy.

And that protein, that syncytin protein, was originally a viral sequence that we have essentially domesticated in the same way that we've domesticated our pets.

Our human bodies have domesticated this viral gene and we now use it for something that is integral to our

evolution.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

It's amazing to think about, right?

So I don't want to say no, because it could possibly be happening out there in the big wide world.

What I will say is that at present, we don't think that there are active endogenisations happening.

So endogenisation being this integration event where the virus incorporates into our DNA that then is going to be passed on to our offspring.

So unlike koalas, which have this sort of active process going on right now that we can track, we as humans, in theory, shouldn't have any active viruses being integrated in that manner.

So what's going on with the koalas?

This is a fascinating story.

And actually, it's one of my favorites because people all over the world research our koalas in the context of retroviral integration.

So viruses like this have existed in the koala population for a long time, but they are still in this active phase of integration.

So what that means is there are different viruses out there in the koala population.

And so obviously the koala population spans all down our east coast in our native populations.

And there are viruses out there in this population that are currently integrating into the genome.

So there are some viruses that koalas from the northern part of Australia have that koalas from the southern part of Australia don't have.