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One of the great dangers of climate change resides in diseases, dormant and hidden for a long time, which it could wake up again. It may sound strange, but climate change may, for example, allow humans to come into contact with previously remote animal species that transmit new infections.
A team of French researchers has brought a virus from Siberian permafrost back to life to study the possible threat that global warming poses to public health.
What is a zombie virus?
The ancient amoeba virus discovered by researchers is ominously called a "zombie virus." The preliminary paper describes zombie viruses as "viruses that lay dormant since prehistoric times" but have since been revived due to thawing.
The researchers thawed the amoeba virus, which had been dormant for nearly 50,000 years, turning it into a zombie virus.
The oldest, named the yedoma Pandoravirus after the mythological character Pandora, was 48,500 years old, a record age for a frozen virus that returns to a state where it has the potential to infect other organisms. This has broken the previous record held by a 30,000-year-old virus discovered by the same team in Siberia in 2013.
Pandoravirus was discovered below the bottom of a lake at Yukechi Alas in Yakutia, Russia, others have been found everywhere from mammoth skins to the intestines of a Siberian wolf.
Oldest virus revived so far
This last threat is what a group of scientists from the University of Aix-Marseille is trying to anticipate, they have revived and identified 13 viruses of different clades from samples collected in the Siberian permafrost. The oldest of them is no less than 48,500 years old, making it the oldest virus that has been able to be revived to this day.
Specifically, they detail in a manuscript published on the bioRxiv server, these viruses infect amoebas, a type of unicellular protist (in fact, this specificity is intentional) and are harmless to people. But the research, not without controversy, shows in the authors' opinion that viruses frozen tens of thousands of years ago can still be active pathogens and that this explains the serious risk posed to humans by thawing permafrost.
However, it should be noted that this is not the first case of a 'zombie virus' coming back to life after thousands of years frozen: these same researchers have previously 'resurrected' a 30,000-year-old virus, also rescued from the Siberian permafrost.
"Due to global warming, the irreversible melting of permafrost releases frozen organic matter for up to a million years, the majority of which decays into carbon dioxide and methane, further enhancing the greenhouse effect," say Researchers. “Part of this organic matter also consists of resuscitated cellular microbes (prokaryotes, unicellular eukaryotes) as well as viruses that have remained dormant since prehistoric times”.
What are the identified zombie viruses?
It is detailed that the viruses were extracted from:
- The wool of a mammoth.
- from the intestines of a Siberian wolf.
- From a lake in the area.
- It is detailed that their genomes were all different and never seen before.
Some of them represent a potential threat to public health since they can infect other organisms. The scientists clarified that other viruses can still be found in the area and assured that they will be studied. ''The situation would be much more disastrous in the case of plant, animal or human diseases caused by these unknown ancient viruses,'' the research report said.
They do not rule out that the viruses continue to be contagious and the scope that they would have among human beings is unknown.
What about the viruses buried in the permafrost?
Global warming and the irreversible thawing of the permafrost are releasing frozen organic matter. "A quarter of the northern hemisphere is covered by permanently frozen ground, called permafrost," the researchers write in their paper.
Many of the viruses that will be released as the ice thaws will be completely unknown, although it remains to be seen how infectious these viruses will be once exposed to light, heat, and oxygen from the outside environment. All these areas could be investigated in future studies.
The viruses resurrected in this case were found in different samples including frozen mammoth scat, mammoth wool, and the stomach contents of a Siberian wolf.
Be that as it may, they stress that the objective of this research is to understand the danger posed by melting ice and activities such as mining in these permanently frozen soils, which can release not only viruses but also bacterial species that could become infectious to humans.
Warning issued in 2013
Aix-Marseille University professor Jean-Michel Claverie, a co-author of the study, issued a warning to medical authorities about the lack of meaningful updates on "live" viruses in permafrost since the original studies in 2014 and 2015, The Sun reported. "This erroneously suggests that such occurrences are rare and that 'zombie viruses' are not a threat to public health," the research team wrote in their findings.
To study these awakening organisms, scientists have, perhaps paradoxically, revived some of these so-called "zombie viruses" from the Siberian permafrost. The oldest, named Pandoravirus yedoma after the mythological character Pandora, whose curiosity led her to open a box of trouble, and the type of soil it was found in, was 48,500 years old, a record age for a frozen virus returning to a state where it has the potential to infect other organisms. This breaks the previous record held by a 30,000-year-old virus discovered by the same team in Siberia in 2013.
After studying the live cultures, the scientists found that all "zombie viruses" have the potential to be infectious and are therefore a "health threat." They posit that we could see more COVID-19-style pandemics in the future as the constantly melting permafrost continues to release long-dormant viruses like a microbial Captain America.
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