Synthetic viruses could explain animal-to-human jumps

// added November 25, 2008 // 8 comments //
Image...
sunnyspeaks

more from Health:

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

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.
  1. groups:
    Health
  2. tags:
    Health,  Arcticspirit's Darkside of LIfe,  Disease,  Virus,  3 more

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.

    • 1 year 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.

    • 1 year ago
  • ScratchyPants
  • animalia_libero
    • 0
      animalia_libero  

    • Well at least they admit that they're animal tests have been completely useless and inaccurate. Now they aren't successful at killing the mice so far so it looks like it's still not working. Hmmm, I wonder when they are going to start focusing on studying the animal that they are actually worried about- humans.

      We have ways to study human cell cultures, yet these people are still engineering and engineering animals and viruses further reducing the generalizeability of their studies all because they will not face the fact that using nonhuman animals to generalize disease research to humans is far more inaccurate than it is accurate.

      They need to start using human cell cultures for these things for ethical and scientific purposes.

      On top of this, most of the animal-to-human zoonotic diseases come from people factory farming animals. Just stopping that would stop many viruses. But oh, that would be too simple as well.

      What ever happened to the simplest explanation, eh?

    • 1 year ago
  • 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

    • 1 year 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.

    • 1 year 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?

    • 1 year ago
most popular
videos on current tv

current videos