Quote from Timothy Fitzpatrick on December 2, 2022, 21:33

"Thawed and attacked an amoeba" Viruses found in Siberia came to life and were able to kill. Are they dangerous to humans?

A team of Russian, French and German scientists have found in the permafrost of Siberia, in Yakutia , several viruses that are almost 50,000 years old. After such a long time, the organisms were thawed, and they suddenly came to life and even turned out to be able to kill: the virus attacked the amoeba and killed it. Can long-forgotten infections threaten humanity, is there a danger of viruses unknown to medicine appearing in Yakutia and other northern territories ?

Lenta.ru: Can you tell us what kind of virus you found?

Ancha Baranova : A group of French scientists led by Jean-Michel Claverie pulled out pandoravirus and 12 other ancient viruses from samples of the eternal ice of Yakutia. The oldest of them is 48,500 years old, and the age of the youngest is estimated at 27,000 years. In fact, we have permafrost even older, but you can no longer date it with the radiocarbon method. Ancient viruses have been found in ice at depths of up to 16 meters.

All these permafrost samples were taken at a time when scientific cooperation was developed between France and Russia - in 2011-2016. The last one was dated pre-coronavirus 2019. I must say that there is a lot of permafrost on Earth, you can’t re-examine all of it, so scientists chose more interesting areas. In one of the drilled columns there was a tuft of mammoth wool, in the other, a dead wolf aged 20 thousand years melted. The wolf had an intestine, it contained a biocenosis - bacteria, fungi, viruses, and so on, with all the stops. Scientists have studied just such samples - the most interesting.

They drilled them, took them to the laboratory, slowly melted one column after another, did something with them. Back in 2013, at the very beginning, scientists noticed viruses. Viruses were truly gigantic. They were visible with a conventional light microscope, while other viruses can only be seen with an electronic one.

They called these viruses pandoraviruses, in honor of Pandora's box - an artifact from ancient Greek mythology. According to legend, all troubles and misfortunes then scattered from this box.

But now scientists have come up with a better way to analyze it, because it is difficult to see liters of melted water through a microscope, and if you isolate the remnants of DNA, then, of course, you will find viruses, but not alive, but in the form of a record of the genetic code. Therefore, scientists created a model system for searching for viruses - they grew a culture of the almost ubiquitous Acanthamoeba on cups and looked to see if anything would climb out of the water into it.

That's how one of the viruses thawed and attacked the amoeba. He killed the amoeba cell, while he himself multiplied. One virus particle made one hundred. That is, for thousands of years the virus has not lost its properties, as if it came to life

Is this a hint that humanity should be afraid? What is this pandoravirus?

Today, Pandoravirus can be considered the largest virus, its length is one micrometer, and its genome is 2.5 million nucleotides. I love comparing viruses to cars. RNA viruses are very small, they are cars. DNA viruses are much larger, they are already trucks. For example, the smallpox virus, until recently, was considered large - it is an 18-wheeled truck, that is, huge. But the pandoravirus (and some of its relatives) are just giants, which, compared to the smallpox virus, will be like KamAZ next to a passenger airliner.

It turns out that pandoravius ​​today can be considered the very first viruses on earth?

More than a dozen ancient viruses have thawed from the Yakut permafrost, which is a lot. Of course, these viruses have something in common, in particular, their enormous resistance.capsid

 

. Maybe there were other viruses, smaller or more flimsy, but over the millennia they fell apart, and we do not see them. And they saw it.

We cannot restore a clear genealogy of these viruses now, there is not enough knowledge. Viruses are huge, they have a bunch of genes that we have never seen in living organisms before. Scientists, to be honest, have no idea what they can do. If you take out half of these genes from a pandoravirus, it will reproduce exactly the same way as before. That is, these are such particles, they cannot be called cells, but they are definitely capable of moving between cells and carrying some useful or harmful genetic load with them. A truck with a trailer. Of course, they are not autonomous, they are not cells. This is a transitional stage between full-fledged cells and viruses, which has not yet fully completed its simplification to a full parasite.

Maybe it was because of these pandoraviruses that mammoths died out?

Pandoraviruses live in amoebas, and they also infected protozoa thousands of years ago. This is partly due to the fact that the simplest cells are very large, in their cytoplasm it is possible to establish the production of a large virus. In a relatively small human cell, you simply cannot mount a factory for the production of giant viruses. Approximately in the same way as a small city pharmacy cannot be converted into a furniture store, no matter how hard you try.

Can these viruses rapidly evolve and adapt to a new host, that is, attack people?

No, these viruses cannot infect human cells, they only attack amoebas. But we also have a lot of amoebas in nature. Among them there are pathogenic ones, and pandoraviruses and the like, and there are many of them - both mimiviruses and pacmanviruses (in honor of the character of the legendary computer game Pacman) - there are many incomprehensible genes with an unknown function. In theory, ancient viruses could drag these genes into the amoeba and give it new pathogenic properties. And the fact that amoebas can become no less dangerous for humans or farm animals than bacteria, there are many examples, from dysentery to penetrating directly into the brain and one hundred percent lethalfowler's neglerii

 

.

What if, in addition to these pandoraviruses, other viruses dangerous to humanity will melt in Yakutia or somewhere else in the north?

Thawing permafrost brings many problems. But only the simplest thing catches the eye of people: the viruses will unfreeze. Which in itself is already bad. Pacmanviruses, for example, are close relatives of the African swine fever virus, a mysterious virus of great importance to agriculture, and not only in Africa for a long time. But the genome of pacmanviruses is larger than that of the African swine fever virus, there is a whole bunch of genes that have no resemblance to any of the already known ones.

But besides this, there are other troubles. Roads turn into a mess due to the fact that the permafrost is melting, biocenoses are being disturbed, animals are dying because they cannot survive in unusual conditions. Compared to this, viruses that can become potentially dangerous to humans are a slightly illusory prospect, a distant one. It's more likely that some new bacterium will unfreeze. Or right away amoeba

By the way, this year a cold anomaly was recorded in Antarctica. For example, at the south polar station Amundsen-Scott, the average temperature from April to September was minus 61 degrees Celsius. This is 4.5 degrees lower than in the entire history of observations since 1957. Yes, and at the North Pole with glaciers, not everything is so bad, for permafrost this is a good year. This does not mean that there is no global warming, we just got relief.

My favorite movie is The Thing, directed by John Carpenter back in 1982. A team of scientists at a research station in Antarctica found something like that in the permafrost, and it thawed and began to take the form of earthly creatures, first dogs, and then people - it ate them and replaced itself. The film, I think, is a masterpiece, also because it competently dissects our ancient fear of this very permafrost and the unknown hiding in it.

And now thousands of kilometers of this very permafrost are thawing. It is quite possible to imagine that there will definitely be some negative effects due to the large amount of razmerzshegosya. But they are not defined, the unknown remains unknown.

Perhaps the danger is not that some ancient viruses will come out, but that we will find seemingly extinct, but really preserved biological kingdoms. That is, not viruses, not bacteria, but some other form of quite earthly, but ancient life called, say, "logus gogus", which feeds on anything and everything, including people. This is an ancient fear of mankind, and it cannot be said that it is completely groundless. And yet, so far, nothing super dangerous has been found.

I would say that first we need to think about the dangers that really lie in wait for us. There are bacteria that can sit in permafrost for quite a long time in the form of spores, and then come to life. For example, those who died several centuries ago from anthrax and buried deer. Or just dead. As long as they are buried in permafrost, the bacterial spores sitting in them are harmless, but with warming, anthrax may well come out. Places of which historical memory has been preserved are marked. But there are burials that we don't know about, but they can take and leak. All of the above applies to protozoa, especially to amoebas, which do not care what kind of substrate to grow on - in a warm layer of humus or in someone's brain.

It is necessary to monitor all newly thawed areas of permafrost. Do microbiological and virological reviews, look at everything that lives in melt water: amoeba, rotifers, something else.

Is it being done?

I am sure that such studies are underway. French scientists wrote in their article that these studies are conducted by the Novosibirsk "Vector", and I am sure that this is true. But the topic of melting permafrost is nowhere near as trendy as the treatment of cancer or coronavirus. Research is carried out in accordance with the money allocated for them. The state must be willing to provide a sufficient budget for this. Some countries study one thing, others another. The Japanese, for example, collect mammoth tissue samples, they dream of resurrecting them eventually. They are interested in the mammoth as such. But I'm interested in the microbiome of these very mammoths, as well as their parasites - in general, the entire near-mammoth biocenosis. Mammoth is, in essence, like an island, warm and with dense vegetation. The evolutionary processes on this island definitely went differently than in the cold tundra. By and large, in that the French discovered pandoravirus in melt water, there is an element of luck. And if you look in the guts of a mammoth, there may be something like that!

Why do scientists study ancient viruses?

This is what fundamental science does. We, as humanity, need to figure out what life is, where it came from, and why viruses at all. It is believed that the origin of viruses is polyphyletic, that is, different viruses independently came from somewhere. Viruses are a collective image of subcellular parasites. Some viruses were formed by gradual simplification, that is, cell degradation. For some reason, bacteria or unicellular organisms have lost some of their structures, discarded unnecessary functions and simplified to viruses. And some are simply escaped cellular genes that have learned to pack into membranes and move between cells.

This is not a simplification path, this is a cellular spin-off. It is possible to explain on the same typewriters. Imagine a car with steering wheel, wheels, motor. But gradually the engine, steering wheel, brakes fell off. The car has shrunk and learned to travel in the trunk of other cars. Why does such a machine need a motor? This is one situation. And the other - when the bumper of the car fell off and began to live an independent life: he learned to jump into the back seat of other cars and travel there in comfort.

When there is more clarity about the origin of the same viruses, how can this fundamental knowledge be used from a practical point of view?

Fundamental science has no practical plans, it is not for that. In ancient Greece , scientists tried to understand the structure of matter. Democritus came up with the idea that there is an indivisible atom. Then scientists began to understand further, they understood about protons, electrons. But all this had no practical significance - until Mendeleev thought about the periodic system, and then knowledge about protons arrived in time.

These two glimpses of knowledge merged into an understanding of how to calculate chemical reactions, not immediately, but as a result of a huge collective work. All chemistry is based on how elements interact with each other depending on the configuration of electrons and protons. After these discoveries, chemistry became an understandable science. And before it was just something empirical: they mixed one substance with another, something else came out. Instead of understanding, there were just hypotheses, including false ones, and all because the fundamental picture of the world was not immediately drawn.

Or another example - from the field of biology. How were genes discovered? Classical genetics is pure statistics, there are no genes. Mendel's laws have been known since the 19th century, even under Darwin, he discovered them, and DNA was sorted out only in 1953. The term "gene" was introduced in 1909 by the Danish botanist Wilhelm Johannsen, but remained theoretical for almost half a century - the term was, but there were no genes. Geneticists explored their subject of study without having this subject in their hands. That's where the real flight of thought was! There was an observation to understand how life works. And now we are finally reaping the rewards. Fundamental science does not set itself any practical tasks, which is why it is beautiful.

https://lenta.ru/articles/2022/12/03/merzlota/

Quote from Ryan Augustine on December 4, 2022, 18:21

I heard a good point made by Jon Rappoport a while back: if microbes are obsequious then why do pandemics always come from the most exotic places? We fear things like Ebola, Zika, and Covid because they come from places like the dark heart of Africa, the Amazon, or a Chinese wet market. They inflict a sort of primal fear in us. But if germs are everywhere then shouldn’t new pandemics be as likely to arise from Hollywood, New York, or Switzerland? Does anyone from India or Africa fear the Dallas disease? The Paris fever?

Quote from Timothy Fitzpatrick on December 4, 2022, 18:37

Quote from ryan on December 4, 2022, 18:21

I heard a good point made by Jon Rappoport a while back: if microbes are obsequious then why do pandemics always come from the most exotic places? We fear things like Ebola, Zika, and Covid because they come from places like the dark heart of Africa, the Amazon, or a Chinese wet market. They inflict a sort of primal fear in us. But if germs are everywhere then shouldn’t new pandemics be as likely to arise from Hollywood, New York, or Switzerland? Does anyone from India or Africa fear the Dallas disease? The Paris fever?

Good point.