Orange with 6Medias, published Sunday 09 April 2023 at 20:45
On the occasion of the discovery of a strain of the influenza virus in the gut of a sturgeon, France info spoke to the editor-in-chief of Epsilon magazine to decipher this information.
It’s a virus that comes back to bother us every year. But as reported by France Info on Sunday, April 9, Australian biologists may have identified the origin of the flu…in the gut of a sturgeon.
They found the trail of the virus’ ancestor thanks to genetic sequencing. More specifically, this information suggests that influenza infected aquatic animals before colonizing the terrestrial environment. To better understand these research results, the media spoke to Mathilde Fontez, the editor-in-chief of Epsilon magazine.
An evolving story
It is an American virologist working at the University of Sydney (Australia), Mary Petrone, who is at the origin of this discovery. “She found in the sturgeon a virus from the same family as the flu but in an ancestral form, a distant relative of the seasonal flu that afflicts us every winter,” explains Mathilde Fontez with France info. “So this virus would have been born in fish,” specifies the editor-in-chief of Epsilon magazine. It would be premature to go into the precise genealogy of this relationship for now, because “researchers have only parts of the tree, disparate elements.” However, the virus had already been observed in Siberian sturgeon, corals and hagfish, a family of aquatic animals close to eels.
“And by comparing the genetic sequences of all these viruses, we’re beginning to trace a trajectory, an evolutionary story, that would have started 600 million years ago in the water, even before the first fish appeared.” The virus subsequently migrated to the terrestrial environment, bringing its share of concern. “This return to the origins could make it possible to better understand this transmission”, concludes Mathilde Fontez with France info.