Over the past 20 years, there have been three outbreaks of epidemic severe coronaviruses:
- SARS-CoV led to severe
acute respiratory syndrome, which emerged in China in 2002 and killed more than 800 people;
- MERS-CoV - for Middle East respiratory syndrome, which has killed more than 850 people;
- SARS-CoV-2 - to COVID-19, which killed 3.8 million people.
A new study of the evolution of the human genome showed that another major coronavirus epidemic had broken out thousands of years earlier.
The modern human genome contains information about evolution dating back tens of thousands of years, just as studying the rings of a tree gives us insight into the conditions in which it grew.
Professor Kirill Alexandrov from the CSIRO-QUT Synthetic Biology Alliance
In their study, scientists used dataProject 1000 Genomes Project. It is the largest publicly available catalog of common human genetic variation. The researchers looked at the changes in human genes encoding the interacting proteins SARS-CoV-2.
As a result, scientists have discovered traces of a pandemic.coronavirus in the DNA of residents of today's China, Japan and Vietnam. The new work, published in Current Biology, also describes confirmation of the genetic adaptation of people to coronaviruses in forty-two genes in modern communities.
Read more
The largest comet in history is seen in the solar system: it is almost a planet
Scientists have calculated the "pulse" of the Earth: it is 27.5 million years
New method instantly turns carbon into graphene or diamonds