researchers have resurrected a retrovirus that infected our ancestors millions of years ago and now sits frozen in the human genome.
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A team led by Thierry Heidmann at the Institut Gustave Roussy in Villejuif, France, near Paris, decided to try to awaken the ancestor of an entire family of HERVs called HERV-K(HML2). To "correct" for mutations, the researchers took dozens of known HERV-K(HML2) sequences and aligned them to create a so-called "consensus" sequence. Then they converted this information into a complete viral genome.
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