2023-06-04 19:32:33
An international team of scientists from Russia, Germany and France warned that “the risk that ancient viral particles remain infectious” is being underestimated. the so-called “zombie viruses” that revived because of climate change: These viruses, thought to be long gone, were found in recent years in mammoth wool, Siberian mummies, the remains of prehistoric wolves and the lungs of an influenza victim buried in Alaskan permafrost.
In an article published in the magazine Virusesexperts in genomics, microbiology and geosciences – who have been tracking “zombie viruses” for nearly a decade – said they believe “The risk will increase in the context of global warming, in which permafrost thaw will continue to accelerate,” triggering some diseases that had been trapped in the ice since prehistoric times.
A quarter of the northern hemisphere is underlain by permanently frozen ground, known as permafrost. Due to global warming, irreversible thawing of permafrost is releasing organic matter frozen for up to a million yearsmost of which breaks down into carbon dioxide and methane, further increasing the greenhouse effect, the scientists explained.
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“The thawing of permafrost has important microbiological consequences,” they warned. “A more immediate public health concern is the physical release and reactivation of bacteria that have remained in cryptobiosis trapped in deep permafrost, isolated from the Earth’s surface for up to two million years.”
“Revived” organic matter consists of both revived cellular microbes (prokaryotes, single-celled eukaryotes) as well as viruses that lay “dormant since prehistoric times,” such as Pandoravirus, Cedratvirus, Megavirus and Pacmanvirus, as well as a new strain of Pithovirus, found in the Siberian permafrost.
The research links the “resurrection” of these viruses that were thought to be “dead” “with the deeper thawing of the active layer of permafrost at the soil surface” due to rising temperatures. They said that the resurgence of plant, animal or human diseases caused by the revival of an unknown ancient virus might be “disastrous” for humanity.
They revive a “zombie virus” that remained 48,500 years under ice
Influenza in the corpse of an Alaskan woman
In the late 1990s, Swedish pathologist Dr. Johan V. Hultin, who was searching for influenza samples to study ways to combat future pandemics, found RNA from the 1918 virus (known as “Spanish flu”) in the lungs of a woman who died of the virus nearly 80 years earlier.
Hultin has exhumed the body of an Inuit woman buried in a mass grave for flu victims near an Alaskan village. Thanks to the permafrost, enough influenza virus RNA was preserved for the researchers to sequence the entire genome of the 1918 strain.
The scientist said the discovery is a clue to other diseases that might be frozen in time under the ice.
Pithovirus sibericum: it was “asleep” in the ice 30 meters underground
The gigantic ancient virus Pithovirus sibericum It is one of the few viruses visible under an ordinary light microscope, because it is more than seven times the size of a modern virus that infects humansand was found in the Siberian permafrost, 30 meters deep in 2014.
French scientists from the National Center for Scientific Research of the University of Aix-Marseille (CNRS-AMU) revived the P. sibericum of 30,000 years exposing euthanized amoebas to the virus: “This is the first time we have seen a virus that is still infectious following such a long time,” said one of the researchers.
Although P. sibericum does not present a clear danger to people or animalsthe researchers chose their ‘canaries in the coal mine’ amoebas as a way to test the future risks posed by undead pathogens emerging from the snowmelt.
“The ease with which these new viruses were isolated suggests that specific infectious virus particles from many other untested eukaryotic hosts [incluidos humanos y animales] they are probably still abundant in the ancient permafrost,” the researchers said.
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Mollivirus sibericum: found frozen in 30,000-year-old Siberian permafrost
a little smaller than P. sibericum (0.6 micrometers), M. sibericum is another giant virus that is not a threat to humans or animals, but its proximity to P. sibericum left scientists concerned that the permafrost was teeming with undead pathogens.
“We cannot rule out that distant viruses from ancient Siberian human (or animal) populations may re-emerge as Arctic permafrost layers melt or are disrupted by industrial activities,” the researchers wrote in 2015.
Mammoth pandoravirus and megavirus: found in frozen mammoth wool
As he mammoth Pandoravirus As the mammoth Megavirus they were discovered in mammoth wool that had been frozen for 27,000 years on the banks of the Yana River in Russia.
The researchers have chosen amoebas as their test ‘canaries’ because these single-celled organisms are close enough to human and animal-like eukaryotic cells to be informative, but not close enough to risk creating a new pandemic.
While these two viruses were fortunately unable to infect mouse and human cells during the investigations, the researchers said it is “legitimate to reflect on the risk that ancient viral particles remain infectious and circulate once more due to the thawing of the old layers of permafrost”.
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‘Wolf’ virus (Pacmanvirus lupus)
Distantly related to the African swine fever virus, the Pacmanvirus lupuswas thawed from the frozen intestines of a Siberian wolf (canis lupus) dead 27,000 years ago and found at the same site in the Yana riverbed as the two mammoth viruses.
Like the rest of these large ancient viruses, he P. lupus is still able to come back to life and kill amoebas (Scientists use them in their tests because these single-celled organisms are close enough to eukaryotic cells of human and animal types.) even though it was “asleep” since the Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age.
Smallpox: “resurrected” in the remains of a frozen mummy
The brutal disease was officially eradicated globally, according to the United Nations World Health Organization, in 1980, but in 2004, French and Russian scientists found the virus inside an icy 300-year-old Siberian mummy frozen in the Sakha tundra (Russia).
The mummy was found in a group of graves made during an outbreak of smallpox between the late 17th and early 18th centuries in the northeastern region of Siberia. The wooden tombs were buried in permafrost, but the pockmarked tomb had been filled with five frozen mummies.
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