Colleagues of the University of California San Diego has
discovered a new path of evolution. They found a process that is previsously
unseen in evolution. With these new finding they were doing research on how
mutations arise to make transmission easy from one host to another and how
genes acquire new functions. This could be applied to investagate virual
diseases such as bird flu and Ebola. This was a step in the right direction for
these researchers, they realized by learning how virsues achieve evolutionary
flexibility they can have a new way of how to step up “road blocks” to stop new
diseases from emerging.
Katherine Petrie led this project, the researchers used
lamba, which is a virus that infect bacteria but not humans; this allows flexibility
in lab testing. In the lab they were able to capture the evolutionary process
in action. They found that the proteins mistakes allowed the virus to infect
the normal host. Now the researchers are looking for eamples of their new
discovered evolutionary epsidoe and to see how common this is.
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