Jakarta –
Scientists fear that ancient ‘time traveller’ viral pathogens may leak onto the world as their icy prison in the permafrost thaws. During this time, ancient viruses sealed in permafrost for thousands of years, could survive and develop into free-living dominant species for up to one third of bacterial-like hosts.
But researchers at the European Commission’s Joint Research Center found about three percent of the ancient virus became dominant after being released from the ice.
New findings show that the risks posed by time-traveling pathogens can be a major driver of ecological change and a threat to human health.
In 2022, scientists announced that they had revived a 48,500 year old virus found in the thawing Siberian permafrost. It was one of seven types of viruses in the permafrost that had been resurrected after thousands of years.
The youngest virus has been frozen for 27,000 years, and the oldest, Pandoravirus yedoma, has been frozen for 48,500 years.
Although the virus is not considered a risk to humans, scientists warn that another virus exposed by melting ice could become “disastrous” and cause a new pandemic. For example, Alaska’s permafrost trapped an influenza virus that spread in 1981, which could trigger another outbreak.
As climate change occurs, permafrost-locked pathogens begin to thaw. They say that the melting of permafrost due to climate change could pose a new threat to humans and animals.
There has been much research into how such pathogens might impact humans, but the most recent has used a less studied approach.
The team measured the ecological risk posed by these microbes using computer simulations by conducting artificial evolution experiments in which a digital virus-like pathogen from the past attacked a bacterial-like host community.
Researchers have several hypotheses, as they expect ancient pathogens to be more susceptible to competition than modern ones.
“Modern hosts may also have fled ancient pathogens during their co-evolutionary history, and may have retained their evolutionary resistance, thereby challenging the invader to find a susceptible host,” reads the study published in PLOS Computational Biology.
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(his/her)
2023-07-30 08:00:16
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