Sigh … I hate when Tumblr takes a nice, long, well-researched answer to a submitted question and deletes 90% of the post. Here’s the full answer.
Tunagobbler asked “Where does the Ebola virus come from?”
That’s a very interesting story. There’s some debate about this in the “literature,” as they say. Ebola virus and a relative called Marburg virus are extremely deadly little buggers that cause your body to literally bleed itself to death from the inside out. It’s not a pretty picture.
All viruses carry some sort of genetic information, at the very least including envelope proteins (their “shell”) and often, but not always, replication machinery, gene expression machinery, and even proteins to evade or attack their host. Ebola virus is part of a family called “filoviruses” that carry their genetic information on RNA, not DNA like we do. It actually packages a protein in its shell to start making copies of these genes when it infects us (RNA -> RNA) and our bodies are fooled into making their proteins for them (RNA -> protein).
What does this have to do with where they come from? Well most of what we know about virus age and human encounters we get from our own genome. We are full of little pieces of genetic sequence (inactive, luckily) from viruses that infected our ancestors and earlier species and had some of their genetic info deposited in us as DNA. By making a timeline out of these, we know how old a virus is in our world. Because Ebola never exists as DNA (just RNA straight to protein), though, there isn’t much info to go off of in our genome.
Although the first reported outbreak was in 1976, some tiny pieces of Ebola’s genome were recently discovered in small mammals and rodents. This means that although the current form of Ebola may be pretty new, viruses very close to it have been interacting with mammals for millions of years.
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tunagobbler said:
Ohh..ok ok! I thought we got it from monkeys or something. Thanks! I never thought you’d answer :)
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