Picked up…
Papillomaviruses were transmitted to humans during sex with Neanderthals
Sergey Vasiliev, Naked Science
Of the hundreds of papillomaviruses affecting humans, two – HPV16 and HPV18 – are especially dangerous, acting as powerful oncogenic factors. Cervical cancer is almost always associated with them, but they can cause the appearance of tumors in other tissues – for example, the throat. Robert Burk, a virologist at the Einstein College of Medicine in New York, has been studying HPV16 genetics for many years. The new results of his team's work are presented in an article published in the journal PLOS Pathogens (Chen et al., Niche adaptation and viral transmission of human papillomaviruses from archaic hominins to modern humans).
To find out the origin and evolutionary history of this papillomavirus, scientists turned to our close relatives and isolated HPV16 particles that infected rhesus monkeys, as well as miniature squirrel monkeys saimiri - representatives of the monkey lines of the Old and New World.
Comparison of their genomes showed that viruses that infected different primate species, but the same parts of their bodies, are genetically closer to each other than viruses of the same animal species, but living in different areas. This indicates that the specialization of papillomaviruses on the infection of a particular tissue began even before their transition to humans. Their adaptation to the body has been going on for about 40 million years.
In addition, Robert Bark and colleagues compared the genotypes of 212 human HPV16 (and partial genotypes of more than 3,500 viruses) isolated from patients around the world. This allowed us to reconstruct the relatively recent prehistory of the disease and show that the separation of the "human" line occurred about 618 thousand years ago, after which HPV16 split into four subtypes that spread across Eurasia. This period coincides with the time of the separation of Neanderthals and their settlement on the continent.
A diagram from an article in PLOS Pathogens – VM.
The HPV16 A subtype is still practically not found in Africa, but its A1-3 varieties are widespread in Europe, and A4 in Asia. According to the authors, this indicates the transmission of the virus to people who came out of Africa directly from Neanderthals, during crosses and sexual contacts in general (ironically, together with many important immunity genes) over the past 80 thousand years. With less certainty, the same conclusions can be drawn about other variants of HPV16 papillomavirus.
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