(ORDO NEWS) — An international team of researchers from France and Germany has “revived” viruses frozen for tens of thousands of years in permafrost. Those were still able to infect living organisms.
Permafrost is an excellent preservative: many animal corpses and plant remains have been found that have remained in the frozen ground for thousands of years.
It is also known that plant seeds preserved in ice can germinate after thawing, and bacterial spores and viruses can be returned to active life.
To avoid possible consequences, scientists work only with giant viruses, the purpose of which are single-celled microorganisms, and not plants and animals.
By collecting seven samples of permafrost in Eastern Siberia researchers from France and Germany were able to isolate 13 new types of viruses and return them to an active state.
The “revived” viruses were able to successfully infect Acanthamoeba, although permafrost radiocarbon dating results suggest they have been dormant for 27,000 to 48,500 years.
These viruses belong to five clades that infect single-celled organisms.
The results of the study, published in the journal Viruses, are particularly worrisome given current climate change trends: As the planet warms and permafrost melts, there is a chance that viruses will awaken to infect humans.
And this is not science fiction at all: earlier researchers found an influenza virus in a lung sample of a woman who died in Alaska during the 1918 flu pandemic, and another sample of a smallpox-like virus was found in the body of a mummified woman who lay in the permafrost of Siberia near 300 years.
Thus, “zombie viruses” are quite real, and the lack of data on them is more a consequence of a small number of studies than a reflection of the rarity of their persistence in frozen ground.
It is likely that as the permafrost disappears, humanity will again have to face smallpox and other deadly viral diseases.
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