Progenitor virus

Progenitor has been tied to human history since the Neolithic, when the Progenitor viral disease was contracted by the West African Ndipaya tribe. Though Progenitor was in the genome of many organisms, it was almost universally inactive junk DNA. Within a series of caverns on the coastline, however, certain environmental conditions triggered viral expression within Sonnentreppe daisies.

As a result of this viral disease, the Ndipaya flourished as a complex civilisation within the caverns long before the Pyramids, effectively millennia ahead of their time in terms of construction practices. Over time, the Ndipaya experimented with Bio Organic Weaponry , deliberately infecting animals with the virus through flower consumption, and are known to have performed sacrificial rituals to them, tossing people into a pit to be consumed.

Outside of the Ndipaya tribe, knowledge of the Progenitor viral disease was recorded in passing by 19th century British explorer Henry Travis, who learned of Ndipaya religion and folklore regarding magical flowers. Oswell E. Spencer, Earl Spencer , and Dr. Brandon Bailey , discovered the Garden of the Sun and the Sonnentreppe flowers, and their hypothesis was confirmed with isolation of such a virus on 4 December.

Soon after their return to Europe, Marcus' research on Progenitor uncovered its ability to repair dead cells. An Escherichia coli cell underwent lysis after exposure to 0. After its death was confirmed, the virus was introduced to the petri dish, was seen to repair the cell's membrane, successfully mutate the nuclear genome and cause it to undergo cell division. Though this should have been the biggest discovery of paleobiology since the Miller-Urey experiment findings, Swiss research into the virus was quickly concluded in early owing to allegations of results tampering.

With the government unwilling to fund the project, Marcus left for the Spencer Estate, where research continued privately with funding from the Spencer Foundation.

Though Spencer's eugenics circle agreed on using Progenitor to create a new race of superhuman beings, concerns over the projected mortality rate led to the establishment of Umbrella Pharmaceuticals in March , allowing private enterprise to expand Progenitor research so a genetically modified strain could eventually be created.

Marcus would soon be pressured into running a private university nearby and use its own lab. Edward Ashford, 5th Earl Ashford and his son, Alexander , began work at their British estate before setting up a lab in the Antarctic. Lord Beardsley and Lord Henry , two members of the circle who did not initially take part in Umbrella's founding, also took part at their laboratories in Gadiwell and Loire , respectively. Though Jessica was soon after murdered when results proved uninteresting, Lisa was seen to develop superhuman abilities and was kept for further study.

During the early years of the company, their research on Progenitor was affected by the limits of the Sonnentreppe itself. As production of the virus was triggered by the extremely precise environmental conditions of the Garden of the Sun, cultivation of recovered seeds proved to be a dead-end. Marcus was kept in the United States to take charge of the completed university while Bailey took over the African lab.

Abstract The pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus SARS-CoV was one of the most significant public health events in recent history. Publication types Research Support, N. Gov't Research Support, U. Furthermore, the science team also demonstrated that a population of strains with at least three mutational differences alpha from proCoV2 existed at the time of the first detection of COVID cases in China.

The current major variants of interest including the UK B. Credit: Sudhir Kumar, Temple University. In the field of molecular epidemiology, the worldwide scientific community has been steadily sleuthing to solve the riddle of the early history of SARS-CoV Finding the earliest possible case is needed to better understand how the virus may have jumped from its animal host first to infect humans as well as the history of how the SARS-CoV-2 viral genome has mutated over time and spread globally.

Since the first SARS-CoV-2 virus infection was detected in December , well over a million genomes of SARS-CoV-2 have been sequenced worldwide, revealing that the coronavirus is mutating, albeit slowly, at a rate of 25 mutations per genome per year.

The sheer number of emerging variants, including the UK B. In the absence of patient zero, Kumar and his research team now may have found the next best thing to aid the worldwide molecular epidemiology detective work. They found that the progenitor gave rise to a family of coronavirus strains, whose members included the strains found in Wuhan, China, in December This may help scientists better trace and provide context for the order of emergence of new variants.

To identify the progenitor genome, they used a approach not applied to SARS-CoV-2 previously, called mutation order analysis. The technique, which is used extensively in cancer research, relies on a clonal analysis of mutant strains and the frequency in which pairs of mutations appear together to find the root of the virus.

I immediately saw parallels between the properties of these genetic data from coronavirus with the genetic data from the clonal spread of another nefarious disease, cancer. Kumar and Miura have developed and investigated many techniques for analyzing genetic data from tumors in cancer patients. They adapted and innovated these techniques to build a trail of mutations that traced back to the progenitor genetic fingerprint.