摘要Introduction to human endogenous retrovirus type-W(HERV-W):Genomic inheritance from the past includes retroviral sequences that have been stably incorporated into our genomes and account for up to 8％of human DNA.Such so-called human endogenous retroviruses(HERVs)come in different classes and families and have attained physiological functions,hence have been domesticated,or appear to be silenced and non-functional(Jakobsson and Vincendeau,2022).It is believed,that multiple integration events have taken place,leading to the generation of a unique interindividual genomic HERV content.Additional genetic recombination events resulted in more than 100,000 identified HERV loci within the human genome(see for more details Gruchot et al.,2023a).