Jakarta –
Scientists revived 48,000 year old ‘zombie’ viruses from permafrost, and found that these viruses can still infect living single-celled amoebae.
The possibility of this virus infecting animals or humans is still unclear. However, the researchers said, the permafrost virus should be considered a threat to public health.
Permafrost is the layer of soil that was completely frozen year-round, at least in ancient times, before human activity started increasing global temperatures. This subsoil is known to cover 15% of the land in the Northern Hemisphere.
However, due to climate change, the permafrost is thawing rapidly, giving rise to ancient viruses and bacteria and even the perfectly preserved fossils of woolly mammoths.
Quoted from Science Alert, French professor Jean-Michel Claverie discovered a 48,000-year-old strain of frozen virus from several permafrost sites in Siberia. The oldest strain, which is 48,500 years old, comes from a soil sample from an underground lake, while the youngest sample is 27,000 years old. One of the juvenile samples, was found in the carcasses of a woolly mammoth and a cave bear.
Some scientists fear climate change will warm the Arctic, then thaw the permafrost and release ancient viruses that have not come into contact with living things for thousands of years. Thus, plants, animals and humans may not have any immunity to it.
“We have to remember that our immune defenses have developed in close contact with the microbiological environment,” said Birgitta Evengård, professor emerita in Umea University’s Department of Clinical Microbiology in Sweden.
“If there is a virus lurking in the permafrost that we haven’t had contact with for thousands of years, perhaps our immune defenses are insufficient,” he added.
In line with Evengård, Claverie argues that having knowledge about this is a way to overcome fear and be prepared for situations.
This isn’t the first time Claverie has revived the ‘zombie virus’. Previously, he has published research on similar topics since 2014, and says that outside of his work, very few researchers take the virus seriously.
“This erroneously suggests that such events are rare and that ‘zombie viruses’ are not a public health threat,” Claverie and colleagues wrote in the journal Viruses published Feb. 18.
In that study, Claverie and his team were able to revive several new strains of the zombie virus and found that each was still able to infect cultivated amoebas.
This finding, said Claverie, should be considered a scientific curiosity and a public health threat of concern that should be watched out for.
“We view the virus that infects the amoeba as a surrogate for all other possible viruses that may be present in the permafrost,” he said.
Research on frozen viruses like this one helps scientists understand more about how ancient viruses functioned, and whether or not they had the potential to infect animals and humans.
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(rns/rns)
