A team at Aix-Marseille University took nine samples, seven of them ancient Siberian permafrost, and tested whether anything frozen inside them could still infect a living cell.
They isolated thirteen new viruses across five different viral groups, all able to infect amoeba cells in a laboratory dish. One strain, a pandoravirus pulled from ancient Siberian ground, had been frozen for more than 48,500 years, the oldest virus anyone had revived and shown to still infect a cell.
None of these viruses can infect humans, since they only target amoebae, but the team's point was about the ground itself. As the Arctic keeps warming and permafrost keeps thawing, older material is exposed every year, and this work shows some of what it holds can still be biologically active. Whether anything dangerous to people could do the same is the open question driving the search.
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Older than agriculture, and still contagious.
Source
- Alempic, J.-M., Lartigue, A., Goncharov, A. E., Grosse, G., Strauss, J., Tikhonov, A. N., Fedorov, A. N., Poirot, O., Legendre, M., Santini, S., Abergel, C., & Claverie, J.-M. (2023). An Update on Eukaryotic Viruses Revived from Ancient Permafrost. Viruses, 15(2). https://doi.org/10.3390/v15020564