>From Sigma Xi - registration required
| Coronavirus: An Evolutionary Perspective |
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The Sigma Xi Committee on Lectureships continues its COVID-19 series on Friday,
September 25, from 2:00 p.m.–3:00 p.m. ET on Zoom.
Speaker: David Deamer, PhD, Research Professor, Biomolecular Engineering at The
University of California at Santa Cruz
Moderator: Kirsten "Kiki" Sanford, PhD, neurophysiologist, science
communicator, and host and producer of This Week in Science (TWIS) podcast
Register at this link.
Cost: Free
Abstract: Where did the novel coronavirus come from? For that matter, where
does any virus come from? The easy answer is that no one knows with certainty.
However, it is clear that viruses can only reproduce in a living cell, so let's
go back in time 4 billion years to the beginning of life on Earth. There are
two possibilities: Perhaps there were conditions in which certain nucleic acids
could assemble, then begin to grow and replicate by themselves. In that case,
viruses came first and only later evolved to become infective agents. The
second possibility is that cellular life originated first and incorporated a
primitive version of nucleic acids capable of reproducing themselves. At some
point certain species of nucleic acids escaped from a dying cell and were taken
up by a living cell. Something like this still happens today when plasmids are
released by bacteria and deliver genetic information to other bacteria when
they incorporate the plasmids. The difference between plasmids and viral
nucleic acids is that viral genomes can reproduce and make copies of themselves
along with viral proteins, but plasmids cannot. A last point to make is that
there are infective agents even simpler than viruses. These are called viroids,
and they are little more than a ring of RNA composed of several hundred
nucleotides. Viroids infect plant cells, reproduce using polymerase enzymes of
the cell and can cause a variety of plant diseases. It has been suggested that
viroids are remnants of the process by which cellular life originated. We will
explore this possibility as an approach to understanding how viruses could have
emerged and then coevolved with cellular forms of life, finally becoming
infective agents like the novel coronavirus.
Feel free to share this information with colleagues. Contact
[email protected] with questions.
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