• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Microbes & Microorganisms Surviving In Deep Freeze (Permafrost; Ice)

ramonmercado

CyberPunk
Joined
Aug 19, 2003
Messages
58,109
Location
Eblana
Microbes survive deep permafrost
By Becky McCall



Typically bacteria in the permafrost are in a dormant state
Microbes in the Alaskan permafrost have been found living in temperatures as low as minus 40 degrees Celsius.

The discovery raises concerns that the activity of these bacteria, once thought inactive at such extreme temperatures, could be making a considerable contribution to greenhouse gas production.

Scientists found that bacteria taken from the Alaskan tundra soil release gases during energy production whilst apparently in a frozen state.

This runs contrary to textbook biology, which dictates the need for freely available water to allow these single-celled life forms to function.

Typically, bacteria in the permafrost are in a dormant state

Dr Nicolai Panikov
Dr Nicolai Panikov, from the Stevens Institute of Technology, New Jersey, US, and colleague, Dr Vladimir Romanovsky, from the University of Alaska, tested the mixture of bacteria and registered the production of gases; by-products of metabolism.

"Typically, bacteria in the permafrost are in a dormant state but we have found that they reproduce very slowly and respire producing gases including CO2 and methane when frozen," Dr Panikov said.

Frozen cells

Water is considered essential for life, whether at the single-cell level, such as in bacteria, or in larger animals. It helps the exchange of essential gases between the bacteria and the outside.

So the discovery of bacteria, thought to be frozen solid at such extreme temperatures, raises many interesting questions about the survival mechanisms used in these harsh conditions.


Click here to see how much Arctic permafrost is projected to disappear in the coming decades


More details

"We have found that it is not pure ice but the mixture of ice and mineral particles that allows for the exchange of gases," Dr Panikov told BBC News website.

"One explanation is that the bacteria oxidise substances in the permafrost to generate heat inside themselves or that these microbes create anti-freeze compounds that keep water liquefied inside their cells."

Permafrost covers about one fifth of the world's land surface and is frozen over most of Alaska, Northern Canada and Siberia, from depths of a few centimetres to 300m (1,000ft). Long considered a major carbon sink, recent evidence suggests that the permafrost is thawing as global temperatures rise.

Even a small increase in temperature will have a significant increase on the rate of metabolic activity in these bacteria affecting the biochemistry of the soil.

If the activity of these bacteria was incorporated into models of climate change prediction, the permafrost may take on the role of a source of greenhouse gases rather than a sink.

EARTH'S FROZEN GROUND
Permafrost is permanent year-round frozen ground
Soils many cm below surface never rise above 0C
Only top few cm thaw in summer - "active layer"
Many regions have been like this for 1,000s of years
Major thaw changes water distribution in ecosystem
Sequestered carbon released; buildings destabilised
"Our results predict the rate of actual degradation- it shows that it's not necessary for the temperature to rise to freezing point for the stimulation of the degradation process," said Dr Panikov.

Knut Stamnes, Professor of atmospheric physics at Stevens, believes that as the permafrost thaws the greatest threat comes from methane.

"Methane is more important than CO2 in producing greenhouse gases because the atmosphere is relatively saturated with CO2 but not with methane yet. This is a new area for exploration." said Professor Stamnes.

Life forms on other planets

In fact, methane gas was recently found by the European Space Agency (Esa) Mars Express mission in the lower atmosphere of the Red Planet and has been associated with ground ice, fuelling speculation about a biological source of the methane.


Permafrost covers about one fifth of the world's land surface
Professor Dawn Sumner, associate professor of geology at the University of California-Davis, advises the US space agency (Nasa) Mars Exploration and Analysis Group.

She believes that the 2007 Phoenix Lander mission to Mars will have increased access to potentially habitable zones and that if life does exist, it is likely to be found in ice first.

"Panikov's results could extend our concept of possible habitable zones to colder temperatures than previously envisioned," said Professor Sumner.

"If low temperature life does exist on another planet, we are likely to find it in ice first because we have identified many very cold, icy environments, but very few environments with liquid water, especially ones that are accessible to robotic missions."

More details on the bacteria research are due to be published in the Soil Biology & Biochemistry journal.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4287579.stm
 
30 k years old frozen bacteria wakes up

Frozen bacterium adds to Mars speculation
A newly-discovered life form that froze on Earth 30,000 years ago was apparently alive all that time and started swimming as soon as it thawed, a NASA scientist reports.

Richard Hoover, of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Centre in Alabama, says the find has implications for possible contemporary life on Mars.

The organism - a bacterium dubbed Carnobacterium pleistocenium - probably flourished in the Pleistocene Age, along with woolly mammoths and sabre-tooth tigers.

Dr Hoover discovered the bacterium near the town of Fox, Alaska, in a tunnel drilled through permafrost - a mix of permanently frozen ice, soil and rock.

"When they cut into the Fox tunnel, they actually cut through Pleistocene ice wedges, which are similar to structures that we see on Mars," Dr Hoover said.

Dr Hoover says these ice wedges contain a golden-brown layer about half-a-metre thick, and this layer contained a group of microscopic brownish bacteria.

"These bacteria that had just thawed out of the ice... were swimming around," he said.

"The instant the ice melted, they started swimming. They were alive... but they had been frozen for over 30,000 years."

Dr Hoover says this discovery, coupled with research released this week by the European Space Agency, makes it more likely that life could be found on Mars.

Life on Mars

Scientists have focused on Mars as the most likely spot in our solar system for Earth-like life, but none has so far been confirmed.

What has been found is ample evidence that water once flowed on the currently cold and frost-locked planet.

This is significant because liquid water - not ice - has been seen as a prerequisite for life as it is known on Earth.

Images made by the European Mars Express space probe indicate a giant frozen sea near the Martian equator, the first time scientists have detected evidence of ice beyond Mars' polar caps.

Dr Hoover says this vast sea is covered by a layer of dust, which might be heated by the sun and could conduct heat down to create sub-surface layers of water from time to time.

"Those layers would be ideal regions for microbiological activity and so that means that the presence of this frozen sea, if that turns out to be precisely what's going on, it greatly enhances the possibility that there may be life existing on Mars today," he said.

The discovery of the living bacteria in Alaska's permafrost raises another possibility, Dr Hoover says.

"The other thing that's exciting: Just like we found in the Fox tunnel of Alaska, frozen biology in the form of unicellular bacteria might even have remained alive, frozen in the Martian sea," he said.

Dr Hoover found the bacterium in 2000, but it took five years to confirm that it was in fact a new form of life.

The finding was published in January in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology, the official journal of record for such matters

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/20 ... 310099.htm

Anyone care to speculate on how the process of re-animation works? There must be some applications for whatever is going on... Hopefully it is a 'nice' bacteria...
:(
 
Last edited by a moderator:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/04/science/out-of-siberian-ice-a-virus-revived.html?_r=2

Siberia fills the heads of scientists with dreams of resurrection. For millions of years, its tundra has gradually turned to permafrost, entombing animals and other organisms in ice. Some of their remains are exquisitely well preserved — so well, in fact, that some scientists have nibbled on the meat of woolly mammoths.

Some researchers even hope to find viable mammoth cells that they can use to clone the animals back from extinction. And in 2012, Russian scientists reported coaxing a seed buried in the permafrost for 32,000 years to sprout into a flower.

Now a team of French and Russian researchers has performed a resurrection of a more sinister nature. From Siberian permafrost more than 30,000 years old, they have revived a virus that’s new to science.

“To pull out a virus that’s 30,000 years old and actually grow it, that’s pretty impressive,” said Scott O. Rogers of Bowling Green State University who was not involved in the research. “This goes well beyond what anyone else has done.”

The thawed virus, which infects amoebae, is not a threat to humans. But if the new study holds up to scrutiny, it raises the possibility that disease-causing viruses may also be lurking in the permafrost.

The new virus was discovered by a group of researchers led by Chantal Abergel and Jean-Michel Claverie, a wife-and-husband team at Aix-Marseille University in France. Dr. Abergel and Dr. Claverie are veteran virus hunters, specializing in finding new species of so-called giant viruses.

Familiar viruses are tiny and have few genes. The influenza virus, for example, has 13 genes and is about 100 nanometers across. But giant viruses, which typically infect amoebae, can be 1,000 times bigger and have more than 2,500 genes.

Researchers at the Russian Academy of Sciences sent Dr. Abergel and Dr. Claverie small pieces of permafrost extracted from a Siberian riverbank in 2000.

To search for giant viruses in the samples, the French researchers added bits of the permafrost to colonies of amoebae to see if any viruses in the permafrost could infect them. The amoebae began to die — a sign that something in the permafrost was killing them. When the scientists examined the colonies, they discovered that giant viruses were multiplying inside the amoebae.

Measuring 1.5 micrometers long, the viruses are 25 percent bigger than any virus previously found. Their oddly long, narrow shape inspired the scientists to call them pithoviruses — “pithos” referring to ancient Greek earthenware jars.

“Sixty percent of its gene content doesn’t resemble anything on earth,” Dr. Abergel said. She and her colleagues suspect that pithoviruses may be parasitic survivors of life forms that were very common early in the history of life.

The scientists describe the pithoviruses this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Its potential implications for evolutionary theory and health are quite astonishing,” said Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Copenhagen. Nonetheless, he said he didn’t think the scientists had fully ruled out the possibility that their samples had been contaminated with young viruses. “Without it, such claims remain nothing but biological curiosities,” Dr. Willerslev said.

Dr. Abergel and Dr. Claverie acknowledged the possibility of contamination. But they noted that they had performed the experiment three times and obtained the same virus from the permafrost each time.

It’s even possible that some of those viruses could infect humans instead of amoebae. Dr. Abergel and Dr. Claverie consider it a worrying possibility.

Dr. Rogers considered the risk of an outbreak of resurrected viruses to be “extremely low,” pointing out that scientists have been excavating permafrost and ice for decades without any known infections.

“But there’s always the first instance, right?” he added.
 
This one is only 700 years frozen.

Earlier this year, researchers brought an ancient giant virus back to life. Now, they have recovered more viral genetic material—this time from frozen caribou feces. For more than 5 millennia, caribou have grazed shrubs and grasses on ice patches atop the Selwyn Mountains in Canada. The animals congregate on the subarctic ice patches during warm summer seasons to escape heat and biting insects, leaving layers of feces on the ground. After drilling ice core containing thousands of years of accumulated caribou dung (shown above), scientists recovered the complete genome of a DNA virus and the partial genome of an RNA virus from frozen feces dated to 700 years old, they report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Genetic sequencing identified the RNA genome as a member of the insect-infecting Cripavirus genus, but the DNA viral genome was more mysterious: It was unlike any sequenced present-day viruses, but distantly related to plant-infecting geminiviruses. So the researchers reconstructed the DNA virus and introduced it to Nicotiana benthamiana, a close relative of tobacco that’s vulnerable to a diverse range of plant viruses. The resurrected virus successfully infected both new leaves and leaves inoculated with the virus. The researchers suggest that the viruses may have originated in plants eaten by the caribou or in flying insects attracted to their feces. As Arctic ice melts faster with climate change, it could release ancient viral particles into the environment—some of which could remain infectious, the team warns.

http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014 ... ribou-dung
 
And now a missing link microbe - with tentacles. Let's call it the Cthuhlu Microbe.

Patience proved the key ingredient to what researchers are saying may be an important discovery about how complex life evolved.

After 12 years of trying, a team in Japan has grown an organism from mud on the seabed that they say could explain how simple microbes evolved into more sophisticated eukaryotes. Eukaryotes are the group that includes humans, other animals, plants, and many single-celled organisms. The microbe can produce branched appendages, which may have helped it corral and envelop bacteria that helped it—and, eventually, all eukaryotes—thrive in a world full of oxygen.

“This is the work that many people in the field have been waiting for,” says Thijs Ettema, an evolutionary microbiologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. The finding has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but on Twitter, other scientists reviewing a preprint on it have already hailed it as the “paper of the year” and the “moon landing for microbial ecology.”

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/tentacled-microbe-could-be-missing-link-between-simple-cells-and-complex-life
 
This research on Himalayan samples identified 28 viruses unknown to science. Researchers expressed concern that ongoing climate change could result in (a) loss of paleontological evidence and / or (b) release of previously unknown pathogens.

Several Ancient Viruses Have Been Discovered in 15,000-Year-Old Glacial Ice

In 2015, a team of scientists from the United States and China traveled to Tibet to gather samples of Earth's oldest glacial ice.

Earlier this month, they published a paper on the pre-print server bioRxiv detailing their discovery of 28 new virus groups in the 15,000-year-old ice - and warning that climate change could free the ancient viruses into the modern world.

The team drilled 50 meters (164 feet) down into the glacier to obtain two ice cores, which then underwent a three-step decontamination protocol.

After that, the researchers used microbiology techniques to identify microbes in the samples.

Those techniques revealed 33 virus groups - including, notably, 28 ancient viruses that scientists had never seen before.

"This study establishes ultra-clean microbial and viral sampling procedures for glacier ice, which complements prior in silico decontamination methods and expands, for the first time, the clean procedures to viruses," the team wrote.

As the team pointed out in their paper, climate change now threatens both our ability to exhaustively catalogue those tiny lifeforms - as well as our ability to stay safe from dangerous ones. ...
FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/several-ancient-viruses-have-been-found-in-15-000-year-old-glacial-ice

Original Source:
https://futurism.com/the-byte/scientists-discover-ancient-viruses-inside-glacier
 
Maybe that's where the new Chinese virus came from?
 
This 2015 PNAS publication describes one of the "giant viruses" discovered within Siberian permafrost and successfully revivified ...
In-depth study of Mollivirus sibericum, a new 30,000-y- old giant virus infecting Acanthamoeba

Acanthamoeba species are infected by the largest known DNA viruses. These include icosahedral Mimiviruses, amphora-shaped Pan- doraviruses, and Pithovirus sibericum, the latter one isolated from 30,000-y-old permafrost. Mollivirus sibericum, a fourth type of giant virus, was isolated from the same permafrost sample. Its approxi- mately spherical virion (0.6-μm diameter) encloses a 651-kb GC-rich genome encoding 523 proteins of which 64% are ORFans; 16% have their closest homolog in Pandoraviruses and 10% in Acanthamoeba castellanii probably through horizontal gene transfer. The Mollivirus nucleocytoplasmic replication cycle was analyzed using a combina- tion of “omic” approaches that revealed how the virus highjacks its host machinery to actively replicate. Surprisingly, the host’s ribo- somal proteins are packaged in the virion. Metagenomic analysis of the permafrost sample uncovered the presence of both viruses, yet in very low amount. The fact that two different viruses retain their infectivity in prehistorical permafrost layers should be of con- cern in a context of global warming. Giant viruses’ diversity remains to be fully explored.

FULL ARTICLE: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2015/09/02/1510795112.full.pdf

See Also:

Frankenvirus emerges from Siberia's frozen wasteland
https://news.yahoo.com/frankenvirus-emerges-siberias-frozen-wasteland-142859117.html
 
The thawing of the permafrost also threatens to unlock disease-causing bacteria and viruses long trapped in the ice.

There have already been some cases of this happening.

In 2016 a child died in Russia's far northern Siberia in an outbreak of anthrax that scientists said seemed to have come from the corpses of infected reindeers buried 70 years before but uncovered by melting permafrost.

Released from the ice, the anthrax seems to have been passed to grazing herds.

Scientists have also warned that other dormant pathogens entombed in frozen soil may be roused by global warming, such as from old smallpox graves.

In 2014 scientists revived a giant but harmless virus, dubbed Pithovirus sibericum, that had been locked in the Siberian permafrost for more than 30,000 years. ...

SOURCE: https://www.sciencealert.com/as-per...ruses-and-now-fuel-spills-are-being-unleashed
 
Vektor - the former Russian bioweapons research center - has announced it will be attempting to retrieve and analyze viruses within frozen prehistoric Siberian animal remains.
Russian Scientists Are Probing Prehistoric Viruses Emerging From Siberian Permafrost

Russian state laboratory Vektor on Tuesday announced it was launching research into prehistoric viruses by analysing the remains of animals recovered from melted permafrost.

The Siberia-based lab said in a statement that the aim of the project was to identify paleoviruses and conduct advanced research into virus evolution.

The research in collaboration with the University of Yakutsk began with analysis of tissues extracted from a prehistoric horse believed to be at least 4,500 years old.

Vektor said the remains were discovered in 2009 in Yakutia, a vast Siberian region where remains of Paleolithic animals including mammoths are regularly discovered. ...

Researchers said they would probe too the remains of mammoths, elk, dogs, partridges, rodents, hares and other prehistoric animals.

Maxim Cheprasov, head of the Mammoth Museum laboratory at Yakutsk University, said in a press release that the recovered animals had already been the subject of bacterial studies.

But he added: "We are conducting studies on paleoviruses for the first time". ...

A former centre for the development of biological weapons in Soviet times, the Vektor laboratory in Siberia's Novosibirsk region is one of only two facilities in the world to store the smallpox virus. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/russian-lab-announces-plans-to-research-ancient-viruses-from-permafrost
 
In newly published research Russian scientists report reviving 24,000-year-old rotifers, which then proceeded to reproduce via self-cloning.
24,000-year-old 'zombies' revived and cloned from Arctic permafrost

Tiny zombies that were frozen in Arctic permafrost for 24,000 years were recently brought back to life and have produced clones in a lab in Russia.

These hardy creatures are bdelloid rotifers, or wheel animals, so-named for the wheel-like ring of tiny hairs that circle their mouths. Rotifers are multicellular microscopic animals that live in freshwater environments, and they've been around for about 50 million years. ...

Researchers previously found that modern rotifers could be frozen at minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 20 degrees Celsius) and then revived up to 10 years later. Now, scientists have resuscitated rotifers that froze in ancient Siberian permafrost during the latter part of the Pleistocene epoch (2.6 million to about 11,700 years ago). Once thawed, these ancient rotifers began reproducing asexually through parthenogenesis, creating clones that were their genetic duplicates. ...
FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/rotifer-frozen-24000-years-revived.html
 
Here are the bibliographic details and summary abstract from the published report. The entire report can be accessed at the second link below.

Lyubov Shmakova, Stas Malavin, Nataliia Iakovenko, Tatiana Vishnivetskaya, Daniel Shain, Michael Plewka, Elizaveta Rivkina
A living bdelloid rotifer from 24,000-year-old Arctic permafrost
Current Biology, Volume 31, Issue 11, 2021, Pages R712-R713,
ISSN 0960-9822
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2021.04.077.

Abstract: Summary
In natural, permanently frozen habitats, some organisms may be preserved for hundreds to tens of thousands of years. For example, stems of Antarctic moss were successfully regrown from an over millennium-old sample covered by ice for about 400 years1. Likewise, whole campion plants were regenerated from seed tissue preserved in relict 32,000-year-old permafrost2, and nematodes were revived from the permafrost of two localities in northeastern Siberia, with source sediments dated over 30,000 years BP3. Bdelloid rotifers, microscopic multicellular animals, are known for their ability to survive extremely low temperatures4. Previous reports suggest survival after six to ten years when frozen between −20° to 0°C4, 5, 6. Here, we report the survival of an obligate parthenogenetic bdelloid rotifer, recovered from northeastern Siberian permafrost radiocarbon-dated to ∼24,000 years BP. This constitutes the longest reported case of rotifer survival in a frozen state. We confirmed the finding by identifying rotifer actin gene sequences in a metagenome obtained from the same sample. By morphological and molecular markers, the discovered rotifer belongs to the genus Adineta, and aligns with a contemporary Adineta vaga isolate collected in Belgium. Experiments demonstrated that the ancient rotifer withstands slow cooling and freezing (∼1°C min−1) for at least seven days. We also show that a clonal culture can continuously reproduce in the laboratory by parthenogenesis.

SOURCE: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982221006242

FULL REPORT: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)00624-2
 
Newly published research by ESA and NASA evaluates the range of troublesome things that could emerge as the permafrost thaws. The potential dangers come from pollutants and buried wastes in addition to microbes and viruses.
Thawing Permafrost Could Release Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria and Undiscovered Viruses

As part of the ESA–NASA Arctic Methane and Permafrost Challenge, new research has revealed that rapidly thawing permafrost in the Arctic has the potential to release antibiotic-resistant bacteria, undiscovered viruses, and even radioactive waste from Cold War nuclear reactors and submarines.

Permafrost, or permanently frozen land, covers around 23 million square kilometers in the northern hemisphere. Most of the permafrost in the Arctic is up to a million years old – typically the deeper it is, the older it is.

In addition to microbes, it has housed a diverse range of chemical compounds over millennia whether through natural processes, accidents or deliberate storage. However, with climate change causing the Arctic to warm much faster than the rest of the world, it is estimated that up to two-thirds of the near-surface permafrost could be lost by 2100. ...

The paper describes how deep permafrost, at a depth of more than three meters, is one of the few environments on Earth that has not been exposed to modern antibiotics. More than 100 diverse microorganisms in Siberia’s deep permafrost have been found to be antibiotic resistant. As the permafrost thaws, there is potential for these bacteria to mix with meltwater and create new antibiotic-resistant strains. ...

Despite the findings of the research, it says the risks from emergent microorganisms and chemicals within permafrost are poorly understood and largely unquantified. It states that further in-depth research in the area is vital to gain better insight into the risks and to develop mitigation strategies.

The review’s lead author, Kimberley Miner, from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said, “We have a very small understanding of what kind of extremophiles — microbes that live in lots of different conditions for a long time — have the potential to re-emerge. These are microbes that have coevolved with things like giant sloths or mammoths, and we have no idea what they could do when released into our ecosystems. ...
FULL STORY:
https://scitechdaily.com/thawing-pe...-resistant-bacteria-and-undiscovered-viruses/

PUBLISHED RESEARCH REPORT (Abstract Only):
Miner, K.R., D’Andrilli, J., Mackelprang, R. et al.
Emergent biogeochemical risks from Arctic permafrost degradation.
Nat. Clim. Chang. 11, 809–819 (2021).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-021-01162-y
 
Reminds me the original 1951 move The Thing were a giant plant/vegetable humanoid was chopped out of the ice and when it was thawed out, it was a bad dude.

I think ebola will get us first before the permafrost thaw.
 
Reviving a 50,000 year old virus; what could possibly go wrong?

... To better understand the risks posed by frozen viruses, Jean-Michel Claverie, an Emeritus professor of medicine and genomics at the Aix-Marseille University School of Medicine in Marseille, France, has tested earth samples taken from Siberian permafrost to see whether any viral particles contained therein are still infectious. He’s in search of what he describes as “zombie viruses” — and he has found some.

Claverie studies a particular type of virus he first discovered in 2003. Known as giant viruses, they are much bigger than the typical variety and visible under a regular light microscope, rather than a more powerful electron microscope — which makes them a good model for this type of lab work.

His efforts to detect viruses frozen in permafrost were partly inspired by a team of Russian scientists who in 2012 revived a wildflower from a 30,000-year-old seed tissue found in a squirrel’s burrow. (Since then, scientists have also successfully brought ancient microscopic animals back to life.)

In 2014, he managed to revive a virus he and his team isolated from the permafrost, making it infectious for the first time in 30,000 years by inserting it into cultured cells. For safety, he’d chosen to study a virus that could only target single-celled amoebas, not animals or humans.

He repeated the feat in 2015, isolating a different virus type that also targeted amoebas. And in his latest research, published February 18 in the journal Viruses, Claverie and his team isolated several strains of ancient virus from multiple samples of permafrost taken from seven different places across Siberia and showed they could each infect cultured amoeba cells.

Those latest strains represent five new families of viruses, on top of the two he had revived previously. The oldest was almost 48,500 years old, based on radiocarbon dating of the soil, and came from a sample of earth taken from an underground lake 16 meters (52 feet) below the surface. The youngest samples, found in the stomach contents and coat of a woolly mammoth’s remains, were 27,000 years old. ...

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/08/world/permafrost-virus-risk-climate-scn/index.html
 
Scientists have resurrected a microscopic worm that was survived in the Siberian permafrost for a record-breaking 46,000 years.

That’s tens of thousands of years older than any previously resurrected worms.

The ancient roundworm, or nematode, is a new species called Panagrolaimus kolymaensis.

It was discovered in 2002 inside a fossilized squirrel burrow in the Siberian permafrost. While the nematode was frozen for thousands of years, scientists were able to revive it in 2018.
This week, a new study published in PLOS Genetics explains that the nematode could survive in the permafrost for so long by entering a state of suspended animation called cryptobiosis.

‘Survival in extreme environments for prolonged periods is a challenge that only a few organisms are capable of,’ researchers wrote in the study.

In cryptobiosis, the nematode’s metabolism slows down and its cells dehydrate. This allows the nematode to survive for long periods of time in harsh conditions.
How they arrived at the date of 46,000 years isn’t specified.
 
Interestingly and coincidentally, John Carpenter's 'The Thing' was on TV last night.
 
Soon our doom will be released!

Science fiction is rife with fanciful tales of deadly organisms emerging from the ice and wreaking havoc on unsuspecting human victims.

From shape-shifting aliens in Antarctica, to super-parasites emerging from a thawing wooly mammoth in Siberia, to exposed permafrost in Greenland causing a viral pandemic—the concept is marvelous plot fodder.

But just how far-fetched is it? Could pathogens that were once common on Earth—but frozen for millennia in glaciers, ice caps and permafrost—emerge from the melting ice to lay waste to modern ecosystems? The potential is, in fact, quite real.

In 2003, bacteria were revived from samples taken from the bottom of an ice core drilled into an ice cap on the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau. The ice at that depth was more than 750,000 years old.

In 2014, a giant "zombie" Pithovirus sibericum virus was revived from 30,000-year-old Siberian permafrost.

And in 2016, an outbreak of anthrax (a disease caused by the bacterium Bacillus anthracis) in western Siberia was attributed to the rapid thawing of B. anthracis spores in permafrost. It killed thousands of reindeer and affected dozens of people.

More recently, scientists found remarkable genetic compatibility between viruses isolated from lake sediments in the high Arctic and potential living hosts. ...

https://phys.org/news/2023-07-ancient-pathogens-ice-wreak-havoc.html
 
Back
Top