As the world warms, huge layers of permafrost melt, releasing material trapped in ice for years. This includes a whole range of microbes, sometimes dormant for hundreds of years.
To study the newly emerged microbes, scientists resurrected these "zombie viruses" from the permafrost of Siberia. Some of them are believed to be nearly 50,000 years old. other creatures.
The team behind this work, led by microbiologist Jean-Marie Alempic of the French National Center for Scientific Research, believes that these resuscitated viruses could pose a significant public health threat and assess the risk of this transmission. says more research needs to be done. The pose when waking up from a freezing sleep.
"His quarter of the northern hemisphere is covered with permanently frozen ground called permafrost," the researchers wrote in the paper.
“The irreversible thawing of permafrost due to global warming releases organic matter that has been frozen for up to a million years, most of which decomposes into carbon dioxide and methane, further increasing the greenhouse effect.
The 48,500-year-old amoeba virus is actually one of 13, described in new research now in press, nine of which are thought to be tens of thousands of years old. Researchers have found that each has a genome that is different from all other known viruses.
Record-breaking viruses were found under the lake, while other harvest sites included mammoth hair and Siberian wolf guts. They were all buried under permafrost. The team used live single-cell amoeba cultures to prove that the virus could still be an infectious agent.
As the world warms, we will also see vast numbers of bacteria being released into the environment, but given the antibiotics available to us, they will prove to be less of a threat. You can claim new viruses like SARS-CoV-2 are likely to pose greater public health concerns as the Arctic becomes densely populated.
“The situation is even more devastating for plant, animal or human diseases caused by the resurrection of ancient and unknown viruses,” the researchers wrote.
"Thus, it is justified to consider the risk that old virus particles remain infectious and recirculate through the thawing of old permafrost."
The team detailed its discovery of a 30,000-year-old virus. Previous research has taken the form of carefully digging up the virus in Siberia. Like the new record holder, this was a Pandora virus, a giant big enough to be seen with a light microscope. was named. Researchers believe that more viruses will be discovered besides those that only target amoebas.
Many of the viruses released as the ice melts are completely unknown to us. These are all areas that could be explored in future research.
Eric Delwart, a virologist at the University of California, San Francisco, agrees that these giant viruses are just the beginning of what lies beneath the permafrost. Although not involved in current research, Delwart has extensive experience reviving ancient plant viruses.
"If the authors do indeed isolate live viruses from ancient permafrost, even smaller, simpler mammalian viruses may also be frozen and survive for decades," Delwart told New Scientist.
This study has not yet been peer-reviewed but is available at bioRxiv.