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Life sciences

28 Aug 2019

Exploring the origins of the apple

The wild apples in the Tien Shan Mountains represent the main ancestral population for our modern apple. These trees produce large fruits, which are often red when ripe and have a varying array of flavors. These were the ancestors of the trees that people first started to cultivate and spread along the Silk Road. Image: Shutterstock. Apples originally evolved in the wild to entice ancient megafauna to disperse their seeds; more recently, humans began spreading the trees along the Silk Road with other familiar crops; dispersing the apple trees led to their domestication — by Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History Recent archaeological finds of ancient preserved apple seeds across Europe and West Asia combined with historical, paleontological, and recently published genetic data are presenting a fascinating new narrative for one of our most familiar fruits. In this study, Robert Spengler of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History traces the history of the apple from its wild origins, noting that it was originally spread by ancient megafauna and later as a process of trade along the Silk Road. These processes allowed for the development of the varieties that we know today. Origins of […]

Health

23 Jul 2019

Are the ‘viral’ agents of MS, ALS and schizophrenia buried in our genome?

An estimated 8% of our DNA comes from viruses. Image: Shutterstock. Viruses hid themselves in your ancestors’ DNA. Now they’re waking up. — by Matthew Prior, Frontiers science writer What if the missing ‘environmental’ factor in some of our deadliest neurological diseases were really written in our genome? Writing in Frontiers in Genetics, researchers from the University of Düsseldorf explain how viruses ended up in our DNA – and what puts them in the frame in unsolved diseases like multiple sclerosis. Neural Cell Responses Upon Exposure to Human Endogenous Retroviruses► Read original article► Download original article (pdf) The enemy within? A whopping 8% of our DNA comes from viruses. Specifically, ones called retroviruses – not because they’re old, but because they reverse the normal process of reading DNA to write themselves into their host’s genome. Retroviruses are old though: they began merging with our ancestors millions of years ago. Over the millennia, most of their remnants in our DNA – known as human endogenous retroviruses or HERVs – have been silenced by mutations. Others, which had evolved to fend off rival viruses, formed the prototypical immune system and to this day protect us from infection. However, HERVs might also be the missing […]