Question: What have you found out so far about how these primates fought off ancient viruses?

Katy Brown answered on 20 Jun 2013:

We don’t really study how they fought off the viruses – the only viruses we see are the ones they failed to fight off! This is useful though, because we can find out all about the viruses – when they were around, where they were seen and which species of animal were infected. Because the ancient viruses are closely related to modern viruses, the more we find out about what the ancient viruses used to do, the more know about what the modern viruses could do.