TY - JOUR T1 - An update on eukaryotic viruses revived from ancient permafrost JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/2022.11.10.515937 SP - 2022.11.10.515937 AU - Jean-Marie Alempic AU - Audrey Lartigue AU - Artemiy E Goncharov AU - Guido Grosse AU - Jens Strauss AU - Alexey N. Tikhonov AU - Alexander N. Fedorov AU - Olivier Poirot AU - Matthieu Legendre AU - Sébastien Santini AU - Chantal Abergel AU - Jean-Michel Claverie Y1 - 2022/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/11/10/2022.11.10.515937.abstract N2 - One quarter of the Northern hemisphere is underlain by permanently frozen ground, referred to as permafrost. Due to climate warming, irreversibly thawing permafrost is releasing organic matter frozen for up to a million years, most of which decomposes into carbon dioxide and methane, further enhancing the greenhouse effect. Part of this organic matter also consists of revived cellular microbes (prokaryotes, unicellular eukaryotes) as well as viruses that remained dormant since prehistorical times. While the literature abounds on descriptions of the rich and diverse prokaryotic microbiomes found in permafrost, no additional report about “live” viruses have been published since the two original studies describing pithovirus (in 2014) and mollivirus (in 2015). This wrongly suggests that such occurrences are rare and that “zombie viruses” are not a public health threat. To restore an appreciation closer to reality, we report the preliminary characterizations of 13 new viruses isolated from 7 different ancient Siberian permafrost samples, 1 from the Lena river and 1 from Kamchatka cryosol. As expected from the host specificity imposed by our protocol, these viruses belong to 5 different clades infecting Acanthamoeba spp. but not previously revived from permafrost: pandoravirus, cedratvirus, megavirus, and pacmanvirus, in addition to a new pithovirus strain.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. ER -