How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus (2020)
Kinda morbid thinking about all the failed mutations as laying eggs evolved into the placenta
Related:
How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25655346 - Jan 2021 (106 comments)
One way that viral elements are expressed are as transposons.
There is even an infectious variant, a gypsy transposon, that can move to neighboring cells.
It's a little odd to consider the idea that fighting off modern viruses today, might actually be impeding human evolution in some way we can't foresee.
> The syncytiotrophoblast is the outermost layer of the placenta, the part that is pressed against the uterus. It’s literally a layer of cells that have fused together, forming a wall. ... There’s no other structure like this anywhere else in the body.”
> When evolutionary biologists like Chuong mapped the genomes of these cells, they found that the protein that allowed these cells to fuse into a wall, called syncytin, didn’t look like it came from human DNA. It looked more like HIV.
So the entire premise of the placenta evolving from a virus rests on the fact that the organ has a unique function requiring a unique protein in the body. Saying the source probably is a virus seems quite a leap of thought. And aren't there many highly specialized proteins in the body?
Has anybody has some more information on what protein in a retrovirus looks similar to syncytin?
If every part of a human coming from evolution, how it synchronize between each part? Is there any books explaining evolution in detail? How cell formed? How they found a way to multiply? How they choose DNA to store the information? And so on.
Cells left behind can make the mother a chimera with out knowing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics)
This seems to be a common thing. We're an amalgamation of different viruses and bacteria that somehow over billions of years coalesced and evolved together into what we are now. I'm never not astounded when I think about it.
Think about it.
The species that is now Mitochondria was an entirely different species.
We carry Mitochondrial DNA, while the human side is Nuclear DNA…nucleus of every cell.
Birth as we know it wouldn’t have happened without a third species invading our cells. We know it as placenta.
Profound that we fight microbes, but without two (that we know about), our species literally (accurate use) would not exist.
At all.
Just, wow.
Dream on
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