RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 An update on eukaryotic viruses revived from ancient permafrost
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2022.11.10.515937
DO 10.1101/2022.11.10.515937
A1 Alempic, Jean-Marie
A1 Lartigue, Audrey
A1 Goncharov, Artemiy E
A1 Grosse, Guido
A1 Strauss, Jens
A1 Tikhonov, Alexey N.
A1 Fedorov, Alexander N.
A1 Poirot, Olivier
A1 Legendre, Matthieu
A1 Santini, Sébastien
A1 Abergel, Chantal
A1 Claverie, Jean-Michel
YR 2023
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2023/02/02/2022.11.10.515937.abstract
AB 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.