French scientists have revived a 48,500-year-old “zombie virus” buried under a frozen lake in Russia.
According to New York Post, the French scientists have sparked fears of yet another pandemic after the revival of the zombie virus.
The New York Post has quoted a viral study which is yet to be peer-reviewed. “The situation would be much more disastrous in the case of plant, animal, or human diseases caused by the revival of an ancient unknown virus,” reads the study.
According to the preliminary report, global warming is irrevocably thawing enormous swathes of permafrost — permanently frozen ground that covers a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere. This has had the unsettling effect of “releasing organic materials frozen for up to a million years” – possibly deadly germs included.
“Part of this organic matter also consists of revived cellular microbes (prokaryotes, unicellular eukaryotes) as well as viruses that remained dormant since prehistorical times,” the researchers write.
According to the New York Post, scientists have, perhaps strangely, revived some of these so-called “zombie viruses” from the Siberian permafrost in order to investigate the awakening critters.
The oldest, Pandoravirus yedoma, was 48,500-year-old, a record age for a frozen virus returning to a form where it may infect other creatures. This breaks the previous record of a 30,000-year-old virus identified in Siberia by the same scientists in 2013.
The new strain is one of 13 viruses described in the study, each with its own genome, according to Science Alert.
While the Pandoravirus was discovered at the bottom of a lake in Yukechi Alas, Yakutia, Russia, others have been discovered everywhere from mammoth fur to Siberian wolf intestines.
Scientists discovered that all of the “zombie viruses” have the potential to be infectious and hence pose a “health danger” after researching the live cultures. They believe that coivd-style pandemics will become more common in the future as melting permafrost releases long-dormant viruses like a microbial Captain America, as per New York Post.
“It is therefore legitimate to ponder the risk of ancient viral particles remaining infectious and getting back into circulation by the thawing of ancient permafrost layers,” they write.
Unfortunately, it’s a vicious cycle as organic matter released by the thawing ice decomposes into carbon dioxide and methane, further enhancing the greenhouse effect and accelerating the melt.
New York Post reports that the newly-thawed virus might only be the tip of the epidemiological iceberg as there are likely more hibernating viruses yet to be discovered.
More research is needed to assess the level of infectiousness of these unknown viruses when exposed to light, heat, oxygen, and other outside environmental variables.
The potential revival of a virus could infect animals, humans, researchers said. (Representational)
The thawing of ancient permafrost due to climate change may pose a new threat to humans, according to researchers who revived nearly two dozen viruses – including one frozen under a lake more than 48,500 years ago.
European researchers examined ancient samples collected from permafrost in the Siberia region of Russia. They revived and characterized 13 new pathogens, what they termed “zombie viruses,” and found that they remained infectious despite spending many millennia trapped in the frozen ground.
Scientists have long warned that the thawing of permafrost due to atmospheric warming will worsen climate change by freeing previously trapped greenhouse gases like methane. But its effect on dormant pathogens is less well understood.
The team of researchers from Russia, Germany, and France said the biological risk of reanimating the viruses they studied was “totally negligible” due to the strains they targeted, mainly those capable of infecting amoeba microbes. The potential revival of a virus that could infect animals or humans is much more problematic, they said, warning that their work can be extrapolated to show the danger is real.
“It is thus likely that ancient permafrost will release these unknown viruses upon thawing,” they wrote in an article posted to the preprint repository bioRxiv that hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed. “How long these viruses could remain infectious once exposed to outdoor conditions, and how likely they will be to encounter and infect a suitable host in the interval, is yet impossible to estimate.”
“But the risk is bound to increase in the context of global warming when permafrost thawing will keep accelerating, and more people will be populating the Arctic in the wake of industrial ventures,” they said.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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The world’s oldest known frozen and dormant virus has been revived in a French laboratory leading many to express concerns about the dangers of bringing to life ancient microbes. The virus was removed from the Siberian permafrost in Russia’s far east and is 48,500 years old, offering proof that viruses are incredibly hardy and capable of surviving indefinitely when they’re preserved in a frozen state.
Melting Siberian Permafrost in a Virus-Filled Pandora’s Box
This particular virus is actually one of nine different types of viruses that have been resuscitated from Siberian permafrost samples in recent years. That includes seven viruses resuscitated for this new study, and two other approximately 30,000-year-old viruses brought back to life by the same team of researchers from other samples taken in 2013. The youngest of these viruses was frozen 27,000 years ago.
As reported in the non-peer-reviewed journal bioRxiv, the 48,500-year-old virus has been named Pandoravirus yedoma , in reference to Pandora’s box. The virus was found in a sample of permafrost taken from 52 feet (16 m) below the bottom of a lake in Yukechi Alas in the Russian Republic of Yakutia.
The first-ever pandoravirus was one of the two viruses found in 2013, although that one was of a different type altogether. “48,500 years is a world record,” Jean-Michel Claverie, a virologist at Aix-Marseille University in France and the lead author of the permafrost viral study, told the New Scientist .
In addition to its age, the other remarkable feature of this pandoravirus is its size. Classified as a type of giant virus, Pandoravirus yedoma is approximately one micrometer long and .5 micrometers wide. This means they can be examined directly under a microscope. It contains approximately 2,500 genes, in contrast to the miniscule modern viruses that infect humans that possess no more than 10 to 20 genes.
Climate change and the resulting thawing of the permafrost could release a mass of new Siberian viruses into the atmosphere. ( Андрей Михайлов / Adobe Stock)
Climate Change and the Threat of Permafrost Viral Release
Given the disturbing coronavirus pandemic the world has just experienced, it might seem alarming that these scientists are intentionally reviving long-lost viruses previously hidden in the frozen wastelands of Siberia. But they say this research is necessary to evaluate the dangers associated with climate change.
“One quarter of the Northern Hemisphere is underlain by permanently frozen ground, referred to as permafrost,” they wrote in their newly published paper. With the thawing of the permafrost, organic matter which has been frozen for as many as a million years is thawing out. One of the effects of this is the release of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, amplifying the greenhouse effect.
The other is that “part of this organic matter also consists of revived cellular microbes (prokaryotes, unicellular eukaryotes) as well as viruses that remained dormant since prehistorical times,” explained the authors in bioRxiv. Only by extracting viruses from permafrost samples and reviving them in controlled conditions, the scientists claim, will it be possible to evaluate the nature of the threat they might pose to human health and safety in a warmer, permafrost-free future.
Since permafrost covers more one-fourth of all land territory in the Northern Hemisphere, this is not an idle concern. The viral load currently locked up in permanently frozen ground is undoubtedly massive, and if it were all released over the course of a couple of decades it could conceivably set off an avalanche of new viral infections in a variety of host species.
None of these victims would be immune to the impact of viral agents that had been out of circulation for tens of thousands of years. Immune systems would eventually adjust, but that might happen too late to prevent a catastrophic loss of life that cuts across the microbial-, plant- and animal-life spectrums.
The 48,500-year-old Siberian virus is a pandoravirus, which infects single-cell organisms known as amoebas. (Claverie et. al / bioRxiv)
Immortal Viruses May Be Returning Soon, in Quantities too Astounding to Imagine
Concerns about permafrost melting are not only theoretical. The once-frozen ground has already started to thaw in some areas, and that has allowed scientists to recover frozen and well-preserved specimens of animals that lived during the Paleolithic period.
In recent years the remains of wooly rhinos that went extinct 14,000 years ago have been found, and in one instance scientists recovered a 40,000-year-old wolf’s head that was in almost pristine condition. Wooly mammoth remains have proven especially easy to find in the freshly-thawed soil, so much so that a black-market industry has arisen in which mammoth tusks removed from illicitly unearthed mammoth skeletons are being sold to ivory traders.
What concerns scientists about this development is that potent infectious agents may be hiding dormant inside these well-preserved ancient animal remains. It is notable that the 27,000-year-old virus found in this new study was not removed from the lake bottom sample, but was instead extracted from frozen mammoth excrement taken from a different permafrost core.
Needless to say, ancient viruses released from thawed animal hosts would be more likely to evolve into something threatening to humans than a virus that specifically attacks microbes like amoeba.
Winter landscape and frozen lake in Yakutia, Siberia. ( Tatiana Gasich / Adobe Stock)
The Hidden Danger of Ancient Bacteria and Viruses in the Thawing Permafrost
In their research paper, Professor Claverie and his colleagues emphasized how dangerous ancient bacteria and viruses could be to present-day life forms of all types. Even if frozen in deeper levels of permafrost for millions of years, they could become active again should the permafrost disappear.
In comparison to outbreaks from modern viruses, “the situation would be much more disastrous in the case of plant, animal, or human diseases caused by the revival of an ancient unknown virus,” the French scientists wrote. “As unfortunately well documented by recent (and ongoing) pandemics, each new virus, even related to known families, almost always requires the development of highly specific medical responses, such as new antivirals or vaccines.”
The Arctic regions of the planet are largely free of permanent human settlers. But the researchers point out that more people are visiting the planet’s coldest regions than ever before, mainly to harvest valuable resources like oil, gold and diamonds that are present in abundance in these previously under-explored areas. In strip-mining operations the upper layers of the permafrost are actually torn out intentionally, meaning that viral exposures during such operations may be unavoidable.
“How long these viruses could remain infectious once exposed to outdoor conditions (UV light, oxygen, heat), and how likely they will be to encounter and infect a suitable host in the interval, is yet impossible to estimate,” the scientists concluded. “But the risk is bound to increase in the context of global warming when permafrost thawing will keep accelerating, and more people will be populating the Arctic in the wake of industrial ventures.”
Other scientists have warned of the dangers of viruses being released in the Arctic through the melting of glaciers, which is yet another possible side effect of global warming. This could expose animals and humans to flowing rivers of glacial meltwater that could carry pathogens to new areas further south.
Whether any of these worst-case scenarios come to fruition remains to be seen. But even a small amount of melting, regardless of the cause, could be enough to release some potentially hazardous viral agents into the global environment, where billions of vulnerable people live.
Top image: Colony of microbes, representational image. Source: iarhei / Adobe Stock
