Scientists have revived viruses named “Zombie virus” from the Arctic’s permafrost, frozen for over 48,500 years.
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Permafrost
Permafrost is the layer beneath the earth’s surface that has been permanently frozen for more than 2 years. It covers around 15% of the northern hemisphere. It provides an ideal condition for the viruses to be preserved while dormant. It has a cold environment that completely lacks sunlight and oxygen, making it perfectly suitable for the preservation of ancient microbes, DNA, and cellular structures.
Zombie virus
In the permafrost, some viruses tend to go into an inactive state called “cryptobiosis”, which is like a dormant stage. When these microbes face a suitable condition, like light or the thawing of the permafrost layer, they eventually become active or alive. If this happens, humans of this era are not equipped with the vaccines and medications against those viruses that may target humans and other living organisms.
“Zombie virus” is the dubbed name given by the researchers for these viruses. The temperature in the Arctic region is increasing at a rate four times faster than that of the rest of the planet, causing the thawing of the permafrost. This is posing a public health threat as the viruses may become potent once thawing occurs at a higher rate.
Jean-Michel Claverie and her team have been studying zombie viruses and have successfully isolated and revived viruses from permafrost that target only amoebas. They even isolated a number of strains of these viruses from different places in Serbia.
A Threat or Not
There is a sparse population of mankind living in the Arctic region. So the threat of the virus affecting humans and causing a pandemic similar to COVID is lower as of now, but it is still a massive threat for the future as the thawing of permafrost accelerates with increasing temperature and time. The bacteria carrying antibiotic-resistance genes were also prevalent in permafrost.
The 1918 pandemic was caused by the influenza strain that was found preserved in permafrost. A smallpox outbreak accrued from DNA in 300-year-old mummies of Siberia. Siberia has exceptionally hot summers, which caused ancient anthrax spores from animal burial grounds to resurface. The melting of the permafrost in that region caused an anthrax outbreak among reindeer. Most of the virus isolates were members of the Pandoraviridae family, a family of double-stranded DNA viruses that infect amoebae—very small, simple organisms made of only one cell.
Claverie and his team have been focusing on reviving prehistoric viruses that target only single-celled amoebae rather than animals or humans. But the risk will increase in the future, taking global warming into consideration, because the permafrost thawing will keep accelerating and more people will populate the Arctic in the wake of globalisation.
They believed that they didn’t have to embark on risky projects of studying viruses that affect humans and other multicellular organisms, but rather believed that their results with Acanthamoeba-infecting viruses could be used to figure out many other DNA viruses capable of infecting humans or animals.
