ISLAMABAD: Warm temperatures in the Arctic are thawing the region’s permafrost, a frozen layer of soil under the ground, and potentially stirring viruses that after lying dormant for thousands of years could endanger human and animal health.
While the idea of a pandemic being started by a disease from the past sounds like the premise of a science fiction film, scientists warn that the risks, albeit modest, are not being taken seriously enough.
Thaws can also release Cold War-era radioactive and chemical waste that could harm species and disturb ecosystems.
In a recent study, released on February 18 in the journal Viruses, Jean-Michel Claverie, an emeritus professor of medicine and genomics at the Aix-Marseille University School of Medicine in Marseille, France, and his team isolated several ancient virus strains from permafrost samples collected in Siberia from seven different locations and demonstrated that each one was capable of infecting cultured amoeba cells.
The latest virus strains represent five new families of viruses, on top of the two Claverie had revived previously. The oldest was almost 48,500 years old, based on the soil’s radiocarbon dating, and came from an earth sample taken from an underground lake 16 meters (52 feet) below the surface. Meanwhile, the youngest samples, found in the stomach contents and coat of a woolly mammoth’s remains, were 27,000 years old.
The virus hunter
To better comprehend the dangers of frozen viruses, Claverie examined earth samples taken from Siberian permafrost to see whether any viral particles contained therein were still infectious.
Claverie researches a particular viral subtype that he first identified in 2003. Giant viruses are a helpful example for his lab work since they are larger than the ordinary and can be seen with a standard light microscope rather than a powerful electron microscope.
In his search for viruses encased in permafrost, he was motivated by a group of Russian scientists who regenerated a wildflower from 30,000-year-old seed tissue discovered in a squirrel’s tunnel in 2012. Since then, scientists have also successfully revived ancient, microscopic species.
In 2014, he and his colleagues were able to resurrect a permafrost virus and inject it into grown cells to make it infectious for the first time in 30,000 years.
He had decided to research a virus that could only infect single-celled amoebas—not animals or people—out of concern for his safety. In 2015, he accomplished the same feat again by discovering a new viral kind that also affected amoebas.
