Scientists have announced that they will revive a 30,000-year-old giant virus found in permafrost in northeastern Siberia. The virus was named Mollivirus sibericum. This is the fourth type of prehistoric virus discovered since 2003 and the second for the Franco-Russian team of authors of the new study.
For a virus to qualify as a giant, it must be over half a micrometer in size. The length of the virus found in the permafrost of Siberia was 0.6 micrometers.
Before reawakening M. sibericum, researchers will need to test whether it will cause disease in animals or humans. They warn that climate change could activate a variety of dangerous microscopic pathogens. Currently, warming in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions is 2 times faster than the average warming around the world, so the permafrost is under threat.
“A few viral particles that are still capable of infecting may be enough to revive potentially pathogenic viruses,” says one of the study's lead authors, Jean-Michel Claverie, of a laboratory at the French National Research Center.
The regions in which the giant viruses have been found are of interest to industry because of their mineral resources (especially oil) and are likely to be widely used and explored in the event that the ice melts there.
“Without proper caution, after the industrialization of these areas, we risk waking up one day and finding that those viruses that were thought to be forever destroyed by humanity, such as smallpox, again exist and infect us,” added Claverie.
In a safe laboratory environment, Claverie and his colleagues will try to revive the virus by placing it next to a single-celled amoeba that will serve as a host. Earlier in 2013, the same team discovered one giant virus called Pithovirus sibericum. It has also been found in Siberian permafrost. The team eventually "resurrected" him in a petri dish.
Science already has experience in reviving viruses that have sunk into oblivion. In 2004, American scientists revived the Spanish flu virus that killed tens of millions of people in the early 20th century: researchers arrived in Alaska to take frozen lung tissue from a woman buried in permafrost.
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Unlike most viruses circulating in the world today, to the general surprise of scientists, these ancient samples, dating from the last glacial maximum, are not only larger than their modern "congeners", but also much more complex genetically. M. sibericum carries over 500 genes, while another genus of viruses, Pandoravirus, has as many as 2500. The modern group A virus, for example, has only eight genes.
The scientific article was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.