Obesity may be catchy
Contagious obesity? Identifying the human adenoviruses that may make us fat | Science Blog
So what if those extra pounds you were finding yourself carring around where only half to blame on laziness? Well, it may be true. The other half could be caused by viruses.
There is a lot of good advice to help us avoid becoming obese, such as “Eat less,” and “Exercise.” But here’s a new and surprising piece of advice based on a promising area of obesity research: “Wash your hands.”
There is accumulating evidence that certain viruses may cause obesity, in essence making obesity contagious, according to Leah D. Whigham, the lead researcher in a new study, “Adipogenic potential of multiple human adenoviruses in vivo and in vitro in animals,” in the January issue of the American Journal of Physiology-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology published by the American Physiological Society.
I was remembering back to my biology major years, trying to recall the definition of this life form. As my memory is faulty at best for this stuff I did the old wiki-shuffle.
The origins of viruses are not entirely clear and there may not be a single mechanism that can account for all viruses. Some of the smaller viruses that have only a few genes may have originated from host organisms. Their genetic material could have been derived from transferrable elements like plasmids or transposons. Viruses with large genomes may represent extremely reduced microbes which established symbiotic relations with host organisms, allowing the loss of some genes needed for existence independent of a host.