And they hope that companies setting up drilling and mining operations on the Siberian permafrost take heed and proceed with caution - for example, by monitoring for unusual diseases and setting up appropriate quarantine facilities. "Because of the Russia-Ukraine war, all our collaborations are stopped now," Claverie explained, adding that his lab will continue to study the viruses they have. Such a virus would need to be studied and understood even as it infected people, making vaccine development tricky.Īs of now, political upheaval in the region has halted the collection of new permafrost samples. Like SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen responsible for COVID-19, these germs have the potential to spread rapidly through a population that lacks natural immunity, triggering a pandemic. The biggest risk, according to the authors, is from unknown viruses. Newfound viruses named for Norse gods could have fueled the rise of complex lifeīut if one of these strains did awaken and infect humans, modern vaccines likely would offer some protection. Dozens of ancient viruses are 'switched on' in healthy cells throughout our bodies Stunning video captures a virus on the verge of breaking into a cell However, the authors said this study disproves an older hypothesis that permafrost contains few viable microbes in addition to the viruses they revived, the team found trace evidence of numerous other species, including some related to known human pathogens, such as poxviruses and herpesviruses. Previous studies of viruses locked within Arctic permafrost have been few and far between. "We are using billion years of evolutionary distance with humans and other mammals as the best possible protection," they wrote in the paper. The researchers focused on amoeba-infecting viruses because amoebas make good model organisms and because there would be minimal risk of accidental spillover to lab technicians. "But their presence and infectivity suggests that ancient viruses infecting animals/humans could still be infectious." "The ones we revived are no danger at all they only infect amoeba," Jean-Michel Claverie (opens in new tab), a computational microbiologist at Aix-Marseille University in France and co-author of the new study, told Live Science in an email. Despite being up to 48,000 years old, several of the viruses were able to replicate within the amoebas, causing them to burst open and release fresh viral particles. Then, the researchers infected amoeba cells with the newly awakened viruses. In a contained lab setting, the scientists carefully thawed the microbes and sequenced their genomes.
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