Health | November 25, 2008 | 8 comments

Synthetic viruses could explain animal-to-human jumps

source: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/11/synthetic-virus.html#

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In a technical tour de force with potentially profound implications for the study of emerging diseases, researchers have built the largest-ever self-replicating organism from scratch.

The organism is a virus based on genome sequences taken from a bat-borne version of SARS, a lethal respiratory disease that jumped from animals to humans in 2002. The synthetic virus could help explain how SARS evolved, and the same approach could be used to investigate other species-hopping killers.

"This gives us a system to more quickly answer the questions of where a virus came from, of how to develop vaccines and treatments for a brand-new virus that leaps to humans like SARS did," said Vanderbilt University microbiologist Mark Denison.
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8 comments // Synthetic viruses could explain animal-to-human jumps

  • jennifer100
    • 0
      jennifer100  

    • That the humans organizes is a virus based on genome sequences taken from a bat-borne version. Of the SARS, and now the humans are the synthetic

      I don't know why but after reading the article, I can only think of 2 movies: Outbreak and Resident Evil.

    • 3 years ago
  • jamodarko08
    • 0
      jamodarko08  

    • I think that is so cool because now humans and animals could have a understandment instead of hitting your pet you could communicate with it.

    • 3 years ago
  • ScratchyPants
  • diode
    • 0
      diode  

    • science is incredibly awesome, and at the same time incredibly scary. i'm going with two scoops of awesome with sprinkles of scary on top of this one

    • 3 years ago
  • arcticspirit
  • abbym0308
    • 0
      abbym0308  

    • The fact that scientists have figured out a way to recreate living organisms in a lab is incredible yet terribly frightening to me at the same time. I'm glad that they are able to study the viruses in effort to learn how they mutate, and to prevent them from being spread in the future. But then all the sci-fi movies of laboratory tinkering gone bad take over my thoughts and I can't help imagining a mutant airborne virus that invades our lungs and turns us inside out, eliminating human species within days.

    • 3 years ago
  • Pardon
    • 0
      Pardon  
    • abbym0308:

      I'm with you on this one. "Scientists re-create killer mutating virus" sounds a lot like the plot to a particularly gruesome horror film to me. I don't wanna get turned inside out! Why cant they do this research with viruses that aren't quite so deadly?

    • 3 years ago
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