Il climate change it also means more aggressive viruses. The researchers identified sixvirus zombie” that are unleashing the world right now due to climate change. They are kept in the ancient layer of permafrost. Rising temperatures could “liberate” them. » with the acceleration of the melting of the glaciers.
Deadly viruses trapped in permafrost: what are we risking with climate change?
It’s not a new topic. We had already written about it here. Studies that speak of deadly viruses frozen in permafrost are not isolated. The viruses have been found in mammoth wool, Siberian mummies, prehistoric wolves and the lungs of a flu victim buried in Alaskan permafrost.
This time it is an international team of researchers from institutions in Russia, Germany and France who warn that we are underestimating “the risk that the ancient viral particles remain infectious”.
Worse still, these scientists believe that “the risk is set to increase in the context of global warming, in which permafrost thawing will continue to accelerate.” literally releasing some diseases that had been trapped in ice since prehistoric times.
The team – which includes experts in genomics, microbiology and geosciences, some of whom have been tracking these resurrected ‘zombie’ viruses for nearly a decade – has published their findings on the rivista Viruses last February.
Here are six long-frozen microbes that scientists have unearthed from the fossil record of rapidly melting permafrost.
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Six ancient microbes trapped in permafrost
Influenza
Yes, it is potentially deadly. In the late 1990s, Swedish pathologist Johan V. Hultin found an RNA cache of the 1918 flu virus in the lungs of a woman killed by the virus nearly 80 years earlier. Dr. Hultin was intentionally looking for flu samples that could help medical researchers better understand how to fight future pandemics. But the discovery of him was a first indication of the ease with which lethal viruses can be preserved in the Arctic permafrost. Hultin, working with the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, exhumed the body of a large Inuit woman buried in a mass grave of flu victims near a remote village outside the town of Brevig Mission , Alaska. Thanks to the permafrost, the flu virus’ RNA was preserved so well that researchers were able to sequence the entire genome of the 1918 strain.
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Pithovirus siberiano
Extracted for the first time from the Siberian permafrost in 2014, at a depth of 30 meters, the gigantic ancient virus Pithovirus sibericum is one of the few viruses visible with a normal optical microscope. With a size of about 1.5 micrometres, P. sibericum it is seven times larger than a modern virus that infects humans, whose dimensions are typically between 20 and 200 nanometers. French scientists from the National Scientific Research Center of the University of Aix-Marseille (CNRS-AMU) have resurrected the 30,000-year-old zombie P. sibericum. ‘This is the first time we have seen a virus that is still infectious after such a long time,’ said Professor Claverie of the CNRS-AMU.
“The ease with which these new viruses were isolated,” the researchers wrote, “suggests that infectious particles of viruses specific to many other untested eukaryotic hosts [compresi gli esseri umani e gli animali] they likely remain abundant in ancient permafrost.”
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Mollivirus siberiano
Frozen Mollivirus sibericum was found alongside the same 30,000-year-old Siberian permafrost samples as P. sibericum. Slightly smaller than P. sibericum (0.6 micrometres), M. sibericum is another giant virus that poses no threat to humans or animals, but its proximity to P. sibericum has caused scientists to fear that the permafrost was full of undead pathogens.
«We cannot exclude that distant viruses of ancient Siberian human (or animal) populations may re-emerge with the melting of permafrost layers Arctic and/or industrial disruption,” write Claverie, Abergel and their co-authors in a 2015 study.
My latest @LiveScience recaps some of the ancient ‘zombie’ viruses extracted from permafrost in the last decade — all are harmless. ‘We would never risk isolating a virus eventually capable of infecting modern mammals,’ says Jean-Michel Claverie @univamu
— Sascha Pare (@saschapare) June 1, 2023
Pandoravirus e Megavirus mammut
Both the mammoth Pandoravirus and the mammoth Megavirus have been discovered in a 27,000-year-old pile of ice and frozen mammoth wool on the banks of the Yana River, Russia.
Like the ancient giant viruses of the past, P. mammut and M. mammut have been shown to be capable of killing amoebae.
For this year’s study, Claverie, Abergel and their team exposed the new strain of Pandoravirus to another amoeba culture, as well as human and mouse cells. The move was part of a standard protocol for verifying that viruses cannot infect mammalian cells. The amoebas, in essence, are used as bait. While both viruses fortunately failed to infect human and mouse cells, the researchers don’t think it’s time to breathe a sigh of relief just yet.
However, the conclusions are not reassuring. They write that it is still “legitimate to reflect on the risk that ancient viral particles remain infectious and recirculate due to the thawing of ancient permafrost layers”.
The wolf virus (Pacmanvirus lupus)
An ancient relative of African swine fever virusthe Pacmanvirus lupus, has been found thawed in the intestines of a 27,000-year-old frozen Siberian wolf. The remains of this Siberian wolf (Canis lupus) were found at the same Yana River bed site where the two mammoth viruses were found.
Like other large ancient viruses, P. lupus is still able to come back to life and kill amoebae, even if it has been out since the Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age.
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Smallpox
Smallpox needs no introduction. According to the United Nations World Health Organization, this brutal disease was officially eradicated worldwide in 1980. But in 2004French and Russian scientists they found smallpox inside a 300-year-old Siberian mummy frozen in the tundra of the Sakha Republic in Russia. The mummy dates from hasty graves made during a smallpox epidemic in the late 17th and early 18th centuries in the Northeast Siberian region. Each of the archaeological sites consisted of frozen wooden tombs buried in permafrost, but the unusual smallpox tomb had been filled with five frozen mummies. Individual burials were a traditional practice in the region at the time, and further analysis has suggested to researchers that corpses were buried quickly after death. For the authors of the new article published in Virus, the 2004 discovery of smallpox demonstrates how severe viral eruptions from melting permafrost can be.
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“Probably for safety/regulatory reasons,” the authors write, “no follow-up studies have been conducted to try to ‘reanimate’ these viruses (fortunately).” But that doesn’t mean that these viruses can live on their own, since rising temperatures continue to thaw the vast northern landscapes of regions such as Siberia and Alaska.
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