Less roots on the viral tree of life?

Less roots on the viral tree of life? ››: To the best of our knowledge, the non-viral tree of life--you, me, ducks, geckos, diplodocci, thistles, sequoias, shiitake mushrooms, Chlamydia, methanogenic bacteria--has a single root. That's overlooking a number of complexities but is basically true. The paper suggests that wildly disparate viruses which look and behave very differently share a commonality that is unlikely to have arisen by chance: their coat proteins may be orthologous rather than analogous and so a phylogenetic tree of the viruses may have less roots than previously suspected. Not only may many viruses might share a single common ancestor but viruses are detectably ancient to a startling degree. Viruses are basically hacks, in the computer geek sense, of the operating system of life; it seems that hacking started early. Will we eventually untangle the web of horizontal transfers and find a single genesis underlies both viral and non-viral life? (via); [Permalink…05-Dec-04…Deserving memes…]

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