Many ancient viruses are lurking in frogs, fish, and reptiles

Many strains of viruses that haunt humans today have evolved from ancient organisms and their existence may be the first time the Earth's first vertebrate group will live.

Experts have found hundreds of forgotten RNA viruses.(PHOTO: CC0 PUBLIC DOMAIN)

The researchers found 214 ARN viruses that have never been exposed before, hiding deep within the often forgotten animals when infections occur, such as frogs, fish and reptiles.

This finding not only brings a new dimension to future human virus research, but also shows that the virus has a deep evolutionary history that stretches for hundreds of millions of years, or rather they evolve. parallel with vertebrate animals.

'The study has revealed a number of virus groups that exist throughout the evolutionary history of vertebrates, and this has completely changed our understanding of their development', according to Science Daily quoted co-author, epidemiologist expert Eddie Holmes of the University of Sydney (Australia). 'For the first time we can confirm that the ARN virus is hundreds of millions of years old, and appears at the same time as the first vertebrate animals,' Holmes said.

RNA virus takes genetic material from ribonucleic instead of DNA. In particular, 'notorious' representatives of RNA viruses that cause human illness can include influenza A virus, Zika virus and even Ebola. Although some of these viruses have been found in newts and salamanders, few studies have been done on infected viruses in other amphibians, as well as fish and reptiles.

Dr. Holmes and his colleagues analyzed RNA in more than 186 species, including reptiles such as snakes, turtles, lizards; amphibians like frogs, salamanders; and fish such as jawless fish, cartilage fish, ray fish, bipolar, and lung fish. ' We extract RNA from the intestine, liver and lungs or gill tissues of these animals, then arrange them into 126 groups to conduct RNA sequencing,' reports the journal Nature.

They focused on searching for viruses transmitted in vertebrate animals, and 214 of them entered all families or direct sister sister groups of ARN related to the target organisms. 24% of them are found in different tissues of the same individual.

'Particularly, fish species carry viruses with impressive levels of diversity, and almost all types of virus families that once appeared in mammals can be found in today's fish. We even discovered relatives of Ebola and influenza viruses in fish , 'Holmes said.

However, this does not mean that we humans should get rid of fish from our daily meals because of fear of being infected with Ebola when eating them. Humans and fish are extremely genetically different, and experts hope that this difference will eliminate the risk of cross-species infection.