Jakarta –
Thousands of years ago, some bacteria and viruses froze in the layers of prehistoric permafrost. Locked in cold arctic lands and riverbeds is a world teeming with ancient microbes. However, with the current global warming, it is feared that the bacteria and the ‘zombie virus’ will rise again and threaten creatures on earth.
Warming temperatures could cause most of the ice to melt and release these microbes from their frozen prison. Once free, the unknown pathogen can infect humans or other animals.
“Risks will definitely increase in a global warming context, where permafrost thaw will continue to increase, and more people will inhabit the Arctic,” Jean-Michel Claverie, a computational biologist at the University of Aix-Marseille in France who studies ancient science and exotic viruses , said CNN, quoted from Live Science.
So far, though, scientists have only studied permafrost viruses that infect single-celled organisms called amoebae, because these viruses are harmless and provide a good model for other viruses that might be lurking under the ice.
“We have no formal evidence that viruses other than amoeba-specific viruses can survive for long, but there’s no reason why not, because all viruses essentially behave in the same way as inert particles when outside their host cells. We didn’t want to take big risks to begin with. a new pandemic with an unknown ‘zombie’ virus from the past just to show us we were right.”
Keep in mind that the ‘zombie virus’ is not like the viruses that infect humans in movies. Only this is a name term because the virus is able to live in frozen ice for thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years. Here are 8 ‘zombie viruses’ that are feared to rise again due to global warming.
1. Pithovirus sibericum
Pithovirus sibericum is one of the largest viruses ever discovered. The virus is about 1.5 micrometers long, about the size of a small bacterium and belongs to a group known as giant viruses. Apart from that, Pithovirus sibericum is also a double-stranded DNA virus which is visible under a light microscope.
P sibericum looks like a thick-walled oval with an opening at one end and enclosed by a honeycomb-like structure of cork and latticework.
Scientists hunting for unknown pathogens discovered P sibericum lying deep in the core of ancient Siberian permafrost extracted in 2000 from Kolyma, in Russia’s Far East.
They revived a 30,000 year old virus by exposing samples of permafrost to amoebas, the only known host of P sibericum. This virus is harmless to humans and other animals.
“Our protocol is to place amoeba cultures (in the laboratory) in contact with various samples, in the hope that they contain viruses capable of infecting the amoeba,” said Claverie.
The researchers named the virus after the Greek word “pithos”, referring to the large vessels, or amphora, used by the ancient Greeks to store wine and food. They published their results in a 2014 study in the journal PNAS.
2. Molivirus siberica
Mollivirus sibericum was found frozen in the same 30,000 year old Siberian permafrost sample as P sibericum.
M sibericum particles are smaller than P sibericum particles, which have a length of 0.6 to 1.5 micrometers). they are also visible under a light microscope and qualify as giant viruses.
These roughly spherical viruses are surrounded by a hairy coat, and can produce and release 200 to 300 new virus particles from each amoeba they infect.
Although M sibericum poses no danger to humans and other animals, the discovery of two ancient viruses in a single sample suggests that the dormant pathogen may often be lurking in the permafrost, researchers warned in a 2015 study published in the journal PNAS.
“We cannot rule out that viruses far from ancient Siberian human (or animal) populations may reemerge as the Arctic permafrost thaws and/or is disrupted by industrial activity,” they wrote in the study.
(juice/juice)
2023-06-06 00:33:58
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