A Human Brain Gene Jumped Into a Wart Virus

Two copies of a human brain gene are sitting inside the DNA of a virus that causes warts. They got there by jumping.

The gene is called BC200. In a study that appeared in Science on Sept. 24, researchers report it combines two traits nobody had ever seen together in a human gene. It does real work in the body, and it can still move around genomes.

Transposons, nicknamed jumping genes, make up roughly half our DNA, though nearly all of them have gone still. Cornell geneticist Cedric Feschotte, a senior author, explained that when one gets drafted into a cellular job, it usually loses its mobility. BC200 kept both.

It descends from a transposon picked up by a shared primate ancestor some 40 million years back. Today it shows up mostly in neurons, where evidence hints it may help control how certain genetic messages become proteins. Its exact role is poorly understood.

Molluscum contagiosum virus, a contagious but mostly harmless poxvirus, is only known to infect skin cells, so the team suspects the gene made its leaps there. It did so twice, roughly 100,000 years ago, after Homo sapiens arrived. Cheng Sun spotted the insertions in 2010 while scanning viral genomes, but the finding sat unpublished until he and graduate student Pu Gao revived it.

BC200 also misbehaves in some tumors, runs unusually high in Alzheimer's patients' brains and appears in small amounts in sperm and eggs, so new copies could potentially be inherited. Whether its wandering plays a role in disease is an open question. So is whether the virus is using its hitchhiker to manipulate the human cells it infects.

For roughly 100,000 years, a skin virus has been hauling around a human brain gene. No word on whether it got any smarter.

Read the full story at Cornell Chronicle, September 24, 2026

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