Nearly 50,000-Year-old Ancient Zombie Viruses From Serbian Permafrost Revived for Scientists To Study

In 2014, the BBC reported that some researchers unearthed a 30,000-year-old virus trapped in permafrost. The discovery was groundbreaking at that time, especially because the virus is still viable to infect another organism.

But in their new study, titled "An Update on Eukaryotic Viruses Revived From Ancient Perma- 2 Frost" available in the preprint server bioxRiv, they have beaten their own record by reviving a virus that is nearly 50,000 years old among more than a dozen ancient zombie viruses.

Scientists Revive Ancient Zombie Viruses

As climate change continues to increase global temperature, permafrost that has been frozen for thousands of years is melting and releasing materials that have been trapped in its icy grip. These materials include microbes that remained dormant for hundreds of millennia in some cases.

Scientists have revived some of these zombie viruses from Serbian permafrost to study the emerging microbes that may come from it, Science Alert reported. They were able to document 13 never-before-seen viruses, including the 48,500-year-old amoeba virus named Pandoravirus yedoma.

Microbiologist Jean-Marie Alempic, the team's lead researcher from the French National Center for Scientific Research, said that reanimating viruses have the potential to help inform public health as studying them will help scientists assess the danger these ancient zombie viruses may bring as they awake from their icy slumber.

Researchers wrote in their paper that about one-quarter of the Northern Hemisphere is currently underlain in permafrost. But the climate change that caused the irreversible thawing of these permanently frozen ground is releasing organic matter from being frozen for up to a million years. Most of them have decomposed into carbon dioxide or methane, which enhances the greenhouse effect.

Nine out of the 13 zombie viruses found are believed to be tens of thousands of years old and research has identified each one of them based on its genome. Scientists said that the viruses still had the potential to infect organisms.

Huge Numbers of Bacteria Are being Released From Permafrost

The record-breaking virus was found beneath a lake while others were discovered in the mammoth wool, and intestines of a Siberian wolf buried beneath the permafrost.

Aside from zombie viruses, the team also noted seeing huge numbers of bacteria being released into the environment due to rising temperatures. Although they are slightly confident that existing antibiotics will help address the potential threats, unlike viruses that could be much more problematic for public health.

They noted that it would be more disastrous if plants, animals, or humans get infected because of the revival of an ancient unknown virus. That is why it is important to study zombie viruses now before they are thawed by high temperatures and released into the environment.

Virologist Eric Delwart from the University of California, San Francisco, told New Scientist that if scientists are indeed isolating live viruses from ancient permafrost, it could mean that simpler mammalian viruses would also survive frozen for many years. He also agrees that these viruses are just the start of exploring what lies beneath the permafrost.

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