Ancient viral fossils buried in our DNA are offering fresh clues about how today’s respiratory pathogens infect and spread. By tracing the shared architecture between long-extinct retroviruses and ...

In the most comprehensive study of its kind, researchers in the Institute for Molecular Virology and School of Dentistry at the University of Minnesota report that most types of retroviruses have ...

Retroviruses -- the family of viruses that includes HIV -- are almost half a billion years old, according to new research. That's several hundred million years older than previously thought and ...

Researchers report in the journal Cell that ancient viruses may be to thank for myelin—and, by extension, our large, complex brains. The team found that a retrovirus-derived genetic element or ...

The koala retrovirus (KoRV) is a virus which, like other retroviruses such as HIV, inserts itself into the DNA of an infected cell. At some point in the past 50,000 years, KoRV has infected the egg or ...

In a reward-free touchscreen game, Japanese macaques favored a button that made a puppet pop up in somewhat unpredictable spots, like curious humans. Six zoo orangutans heard laughter before learning ...

Oncogenic retroviruses are a particular family of viruses that can cause some types of cancer. Scientists have now identified a "virulence factor" that inhibits the host immune response and allows the ...

The origin story of retroviruses has been thrown wide open, following new research that has found them to be half a billion years old, hundreds of millions of years older than we previously thought.

Bats have long been known as important hosts of zoonotic viral pathogens. Zoonotic viruses that bats transmit are capable of infecting humans and have caused devastating infections throughout the ...

Discover the latest articles and news in related subjects. Collectively, these studies reveal that APOBEC3G might protect the mammalian genome against the spread of some, but not all, retroelements by ...