700-year-old ‘zombie’ virus shows climate change could unleash ancient diseases
Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco were able to reanimate a virus found in a 700-year-old sample of frozen caribou feces and infect a living plant with it.
According to New Scientist, this raises concerns about the dangers of climate change, when plant and animal matter that have been frozen for centuries begin to thaw, making it possible for long-dormant diseases to re-enter the biosphere as “new” organisms.
In Canada, the Selwyn Mountains in the Yukon and Northern Territories have been a habitat for caribou for centuries. The caribou roll on the region’s expansive ice sheets to rid their pelts of ticks, fleas and other parasites.
Generations of freezes and thaws and waves of caribou have left striated formations in the ice over time that contain the animals’ droppings. Researcher Eric Delwart and his team drilled to a depth that was on the surface 700 years ago and retrieved a feces specimen that they then studied in the lab.
The team isolated a plant virus that resembles modern day viruses called geminiviruses, copied it and found that it could easily infect a modern tobacco plant.
“We saw evidence of replication in the leaves,” said Delwart.
Jean-Michel Claverie of the Aix-Marseille University School of Medicine in France told New Scientist, “The find confirms that virus particles are very good ‘time capsules’ that preserve their core genomic material, making it likely that many prehistoric viruses are still infectious to plants, animals or humans.”
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/10/700-year-old-zombie-virus-shows-climate-change-could-unleash-ancient-diseases/
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