Seven ancient viruses that were extracted from Siberian permafrost (from the area near the mouth of the Lena River, in the Yakut region and Kamchatka) were reanimated by scientists from the French University of the ex-Marcel, Russian media reports.
As follows from the preprint of a study published in the Biorxiv repository, in the laboratory scientists have cultivated viruses to further study and sequenize the viral genome. Four viruses belong to the Pandoraviridae family, they were not previously opened. The remaining three viruses belong to the families of Mimiviridae and Pithoviridae.
The youngest of these viruses spent in the conditions of permafrost for 27 thousand years, the oldest, the record holder among the reanimated viruses, – 48.5 thousand years. Moreover, all of them can remain contagious.
As the virologists note, the gradual warming of the climate makes glaciers and melt eternal permafrost. This can release and revive life unknown to modern science ancient viruses, against which people do not have immunity. This is what causes the need for their preventive research.