Patric Jern research group

Retrovirus – Host Evolution

Our research revolves around virus – host interactions and evolution by intersecting genomics and virology. Germline infections have left frequent heritable endogenous retroviruses (ERVs), which provide a genomic record of past virus – host interactions that we can evaluate to better understand the biology and long-term associations among viruses and hosts. These studies leverage the fast-growing catalog of genomes from state-of-the-art sequencing technologies for developing computational analyses to characterize ERVs across genomes and populations


Evolution among retroviruses, ERVs and hosts. Three species are shown together with various types of retrovirus transmissions. Transmission of infectious retroviruses (XRV, blue) is followed by spread and selection (red X), and continued spread of adapted viruses (XRV, yellow). A retrovirus infecting a germline cell may become fixed in the population and spread through generations. Although the retrovirus may become extinct, even after speciation events, it can still be detected in descendant species as an ERV (yellow bars). (Jern and Coffin, Annu Rev Genetics 2008).

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