Awakening the virus once existed 30,000 years ago

On March 3, a group of scientists from the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) announced that they had revived a giant but harmless virus, buried deep in the permafrost in Siberia. 30,000 years ago.

This event is a warning that unknown sources, buried under frozen soil, may "wake up" by global warming.

In the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the giant virus - named Pithovirus sibericum - was discovered in a 30-meter-long permafrost, taken from the region. coastal tundra Chukotka, near the East Siberia Sea, where the annual average temperature is -13.4 degrees C.

Sibericum pithovirus has just been revived.(Photo: www.smithsonianmag.com)

The team then "melted" the virus's hardening and witnessed its regeneration process on a lava plate, where the virus infects a simple single-celled organism (amoeba).

This sample's radioactive chronology shows that plants have grown there more than 30,000 years ago, when mammoths and Neanderthals appeared on Earth.

P.sibericum is a giant virus because there are up to 500 genes, compared to only nine influenza viruses and can be seen through optical microscopes, without the need for other modern electron microscopes.

The virus is named after '' pithos '' , an ancient Greek word meaning 'shock' , because of the shape of a mound.

Unlike flu viruses, P.sibericum is harmless to humans and animals when only one type of amoeba is transmitted, Acanthamoeba.

Through the CNRS study, scientists warn of the risks of re-emerging ancient diseases when exploiting the source of minerals and energy in the Arctic. This risk is entirely possible and should be considered in a practical way.