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Author Topic:   Was Lamarck right?
Mammuthus
Member (Idle past 6475 days)
Posts: 3085
From: Munich, Germany
Joined: 08-09-2002


Message 5 of 35 (89530)
03-01-2004 7:07 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by Tamara
02-29-2004 11:30 AM


This is not restricted to microbes. If you are infected with a virus (usually retroviruses), and your germline is infected, you can have the viral genome integrate into your own as a provirus. You will then pass this provirus on to your children, i.e. you have acquired a trait (or several since most retroviruses have a gag, pol, and env gene and some like HIV have several others as well) you were not born with and pass it on to your offspring. 8% of the human genome is composed of the results of such infection events though each one is not due to a novel infection from an exogenous retrovirus. Defective proviruses can retrotranspose themselves around the genome without forming exogenous,infectious retroviruses...they are so called human endogenous retroviruses or HERVs.

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