OXFORD, England, Jan. 10 (UPI) -- Retroviruses are nearly 500 million years old, according to new research by scientists at Oxford University. According to a new study published in Nature Communications, the evolutionary arms race between retroviruses and their hosts began several hundred million years before scientists previously thought.
To detail the history of retroviruses -- the group of viruses that includes HIV -- scientists combined new modeling techniques with a penetrating survey of genomic fossil records of the foamy-like viruses. Foamy and foamy-like viruses are viruses that diverge alongside their host. They are endogenous retroviruses, as their distinctiveness emerges from within.