UNICEF hails South Africa’s new strategy for tackling HIV/AIDS

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharps...w-print-found-in-hiv.html

Feline 'pawprint' found in HIV genome
Jessica Hamzelou, reporter

African lions living over a million years ago may have carried an early form of HIV. Now, American microbiologists reckon they've found a feline genetic "pawprint" in the modern-day form of the virus. [...] Bambara and his team agree that it's likely the virus was passed from ancient felines to monkeys, before being passed onto humans. [...]

skgiven: The study found animal like genes inside of modern human HIV.

There is article which explains enourmous importance of this discovery: "Gene Hijacked By HIV Ancestor Suggests New Way to Block Viral Reproduction"
http://www.physorg.com/news179433709.html

By finding known sequence of genes in HIV it might be much easier to block it, because there is quite a sequence that does not mutate.
Also, the discovery was done using high performance computing, which gives a clear signal to research society that by using more high computing research we can identify even more good surprises inside HIV and other viruses.

skgiven: Probably I had not explained myself clear enough - the known animal sequence was found inside VIRUS sequence, not in human DNA. Now this is discovery, because before no subsequence of virus was mapped to other living organism - human, animal or any other. So it seems that DEAD virus picked up sequence of living organism, so that it's host would use this subsequence for reproducing virus. This is quite

skgiven: I still do not get the part about the bones. It is not HIV found in bones, but animal (actually some wild cat predecessor) sequence found in todays HIV. If you could, try to clarify your comment. Take care