“Zombie virus” revived after 48,500 years in permafrost.

A “zombie virus” was still able to infect hosts 48,500 years after it was trapped in frozen ground. Although this virus can’t infect humans, it suggests that the thawing permafrost could directly threaten human health if it releases other viruses that could.

Permafrost is ground that remains frozen for at least two years straight, and it’s common on Earth — nearly 25% of the Northern Hemisphere qualifies. 

But over the past 50 years, the Arctic has warmed at a rate three times faster than the world as a whole. This is causing parts of the permafrost to thaw, revealing mummified lions, wolves, and wooly mammoths that modern scientists can now study.

As exciting as those finds are, though, there is a lot trapped in permafrost that we don’t want exposed — including ancient viruses.

Ancient zombie viruses: Jean-Michel Claverie, a professor of economics and bioinformatics at Aix-Marseille University in France, has spent the past decade hunting for “zombie viruses” — dormant microbes that could still infect hosts after being frozen for hundreds or thousands of years.

His team has now published a new study detailing 13 viruses they isolated from samples of Siberian permafrost. When placed in petri dishes with amoeba, these viruses were all able to worm their way into the single-celled organisms.

Using radiocarbon dating of the permafrost samples, they determined that the youngest of the viruses was 27,000 years old, but the oldest was frozen 48,500 years ago — setting a new record for the resuscitation of a zombie virus.

Source: www.freethink.com

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