Four years ago, a major news was the discovery of hepatitis B virus (HBV) genes in ancient bird fossils. These birds are the ancestors of modern birds and Robbins, crows and many songbirds – living in 822 million years ago, when dinosaurs still exist on the earth.
So when a research team recently in a fish found in the HBV-like virus, which makes people very pleasantly surprised. They again checked the gene sequence of the white sucker fish in the Great Lakes region. There is no doubt that there is a gene sequence that matches the gene sequence in the online database. Before the birds they had found hepatitis in a creature.
Now the mystery of one of the most notorious viruses on this planet has deepened. A virus that can cause more than 500,000 deaths each year. What is its origin? What is the creature that carries it at first? How is it spread to birds? When was it first transmitted to mammals and primates, such as humans? On these issues, modern science is not close to its answer.
This new study does not help much. This is a scientific first time, is a start. Cassidy Hahn, a doctoral student at the University of West Virginia, and his team of fish biologists are studying that white sucker fish are rarely used for genetic genes, so they have to check their findings again. “We are looking for a different virus,” Hahn said. “We are scientists, we have doubts about the results, so we made some sort of sorting and then found.”
Their findings seem to be a big deal because HBV is part of a large family of hepatitis that can cause a variety of diseases, including cancer, before being found only in birds and mammals. So this finding has great potential for more research to understand how the virus evolves and how the immune system makes changes to attack the virus and design a more effective treatment regimen.
“This new virus is similar, but with mammals and birds found in HBV-like virus is not the same, may be a new genus,” Hahn said. How HBV-like viruses spread between fish are still unknown, but are unlikely to be transmitted to humans.
“The performance of HBV infection is reflected in all aspects,” the US Geological Survey declares that the study. They attack the mammalian liver and multiply in its cells. Such as liver fibrosis, cirrhosis, cholangiocarcinoma and liver cancer, acute and chronic liver disease are related to the virus. About 350 million people were infected with HBV.
“For decades, virologists have been studying the origins of HBV, and if you know its origins, you can see how it changes over time, which is useful for these predictive models,” the West Virginia USGS study Biologist Dr. Luke R. Iwanowicz and Hahn are the authors of this article. It was published in the last week of the Journal of Virology.
“After we put all the sequencing together, and then search the online database, we found that all parts of the virus could be found,” Iwanowicz said. “I have never had such an experience before, and it was really so excited to see that it happened.”
Iwanowicz said that an excited Indiana university professor wanted us to contact him at the beginning of the study, even before we published the article. “I really found this work very interesting,” said Dr. G, an associate professor of microbiology at the university. “I watched a week on a Saturday night and I immediately sent an email to Luke and wanted to study it together.
Professor Gr. G has been studying hepatitis for more than 10 years, and there are still many questions about its source. He wants to track him with plasma and liver samples, and may create a clone to determine how it is copied. “If it’s better to replicate, it could replace HBV for some aspects of studying the molecular biology of hepatitis virus.”
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