Afrough et al. 2019; Goldstein et al. 2019). Ongoing unrests, civil wars, violent
attacks on ethnicities with different beliefs, uncontrolled population growth, poverty,
and human greed collectively have resulted in extensive encroachment of humans
and their livestock into highly biodiverse tropical forests and other pristine environments. Having encroached upon those environments, the humans and their livestock
encounter native populations of animals that are natural reservoirs of viruses and
other pathogens that have the potential to infect and cause disease in humans and
livestock. As a result of increased contact with wild animals, a so-called spillover
might occur where a virus is given the opportunity to infect a new host successfully
with often fatal consequences for the host. So far, the global virome project has
targeted primarily tropical areas in biodiversity hot-spots in Asia, Africa, and South
America, in countries that traditionally struggle when dealing with public health
crises. The project has identified a plethora of new viruses, some related to known
viral pathogens that can infect humans. Furthermore, members of many unknown
viral lineages were discovered, by investigating the blood of wild animals that could
present as a natural reservoir of a virus and by screening for unknown viruses in the
blood of villagers. This multimillion dollar effort is important for disease mitigation
in humans and animals and will add substantial data to the GenBank viral database
but does not focus on the diversity of phages or viruses that affect fungi,
microeukaryotes, or plants that are not being used as food and which don’t pose a
threat to be able to infect humans directly (for details see https://www.
ecohealthalliance.org/program/predict).
If we want to understand where viruses come from, we might want to focus on
some of the oldest prokaryotes that exist, extremophilic Archaea, that survived in
niches resembling conditions of early Earth and which harbor a unique and enigmatic diversity of viruses that might have evolved from non-viral mobile genetic
elements able to self-replicate (Krupovic et al. 2018) originating at a time we call the
dawn of Life.
Antje Lauer
622
A. Lauer
attacks on ethnicities with different beliefs, uncontrolled population growth, poverty,
and human greed collectively have resulted in extensive encroachment of humans
and their livestock into highly biodiverse tropical forests and other pristine environments. Having encroached upon those environments, the humans and their livestock
encounter native populations of animals that are natural reservoirs of viruses and
other pathogens that have the potential to infect and cause disease in humans and
livestock. As a result of increased contact with wild animals, a so-called spillover
might occur where a virus is given the opportunity to infect a new host successfully
with often fatal consequences for the host. So far, the global virome project has
targeted primarily tropical areas in biodiversity hot-spots in Asia, Africa, and South
America, in countries that traditionally struggle when dealing with public health
crises. The project has identified a plethora of new viruses, some related to known
viral pathogens that can infect humans. Furthermore, members of many unknown
viral lineages were discovered, by investigating the blood of wild animals that could
present as a natural reservoir of a virus and by screening for unknown viruses in the
blood of villagers. This multimillion dollar effort is important for disease mitigation
in humans and animals and will add substantial data to the GenBank viral database
but does not focus on the diversity of phages or viruses that affect fungi,
microeukaryotes, or plants that are not being used as food and which don’t pose a
threat to be able to infect humans directly (for details see https://www.
ecohealthalliance.org/program/predict).
If we want to understand where viruses come from, we might want to focus on
some of the oldest prokaryotes that exist, extremophilic Archaea, that survived in
niches resembling conditions of early Earth and which harbor a unique and enigmatic diversity of viruses that might have evolved from non-viral mobile genetic
elements able to self-replicate (Krupovic et al. 2018) originating at a time we call the
dawn of Life.
Antje Lauer
622
A. Lauer