"40,000 year old nematodes?" Topic

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Should I be extra skeptical, just because this has come from Russia?

I like like the caution in the lines:

But the find does have a slightly darker side.

There are concerns that the melting of permafrost could release pathogens locked up in deep freeze for tens of thousands of years.

But the earlier in the article, the writer happily reports:

In 2000, scientists pulled spores from Bacillus bacteria hidden inside 250 million year old salt crystals and managed to return them to life.

I'll come out and state that the latter is far more worrisome than the former. Nothing like a strain of anthrax from the time of the dawn of the dinosaurs. (Not saying that they revived Bacillus Anthracis, it most likely didn't exist then)

How intact is the DNA in either?
Can they reproduce?

I think I saw that movie a few decades ago. Everyone dies at the end. :)

Seriously, though, there does seem to be a few recent Global Warming terror movies about this exact same thing:

The Thaw (2009)
YouTube link
Blood Glacier (2013)
YouTube link

Dan
PS. I truly wish I could include the following, but they really had nothing to do with man-made Climate Change ("Global Warming") …
The coolest of the early X-Files episodes (Ice, S1-E8, 1993):
YouTube link
And one of the best Horror/SF remakes of all time, The Thing (1982):
YouTube link

Nothing like a strain of anthrax from the time of the dawn of the dinosaurs. (Not saying that they revived Bacillus Anthracis, it most likely didn't exist then)

It was probably also not a weaponized bacterium, either. Anthrax sucks (the infection; the band Anthrax is great, especially in concert), but lots of people get it and get over it without ever having the "unspecified bacterial infection" identified (not that every UBI is anthrax, unspecified means its not bad enough to bother to identify for the purpose of specified treatment).

How intact is the DNA in either?
Can they reproduce?

Nematodes are fairly simple organisms for how complex they are. (Chew on that for a while. :)) They are pretty robust and hardy. Significant numbers of species are hermaphroditic; others can dynamically compensate for the lack of mating partners ("change sex", but not really).

While there is an outside risk of "waking up" something extremely lethal, contagious, and hardy from the past, the smart money is on the human race making itself extinct in a number of other ways. The real question is how many other planets are we going to up before we do that?

It always seemed to me that the exact opposite might be true – the "germ-o-verse" has had 40k years to evolve while these guys slept. Our bugs are gonna be a lot tougher than their old bugs.

(Though obviously it's entirely possible that their bugs were things that we once defeated, but no longer needed the defenses against. Because that happens, too.)

How intact is the DNA in either?
Can they reproduce?

Intact enough that they are up and about and eating.

There are only two nematodes, both female.

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Both female? Biologically or is that what they identify as?
I always thought nematodes were ….. ambiguous.

Among nematodes, that's not as big an issue as among "higher forms of life".
Maybe that's why they've been around for millions of years.

Maybe we need to stop bringing up things from the deep ocean or even from clay that used to be above sea level before the end of the last Ice Age.

Who knows what might be lurking down there.

And, while we are at it, we must stop the ice core sample too! They might need to be quarantined, at some CDC facility, just to be sure. :)

Dan
PS. We would have been exposed long ago, for any number of reasons unrelated to man-made Climate Change, and not just now.

Remember for a bug (bacteria or virus) to actually survive in us, they have to be compatible with our bio chemistry.
That's why there are tones of pathogens (including parasites) in most freshwater lakes in Africa) but there are extremely few in the ocean. Humans don't belong in oceans. There is no evolutionary reason for a pathogen to evolve to attack us hence we don't get finnrot.

Digging up well known pathogens we have now might be problematic.
But chances are any "Dino bug" they made might find probably won't affect us.

There are only a handful of cross species diseases (if you ignore stuff like botulinum or anthrax that's just laying around in the dirt)
We don't get Kennel caugh and dogs don't get influenza or the common cold.

Well look on the bright side…

It is either kill you or

It won't

No. It might make you infirm for 50 years with out killing you.

Wasn't Ebola (or some other hemorrhagic fever) discovered a couple of decades ago in a 2000 year-old grave somewhere in the Mediterranean?

If so, we need to stop all digs. The risk of a pandemic is just too great. :)

Dan

Wasn't Ebola (or some other hemorrhagic fever) discovered a couple of decades ago in a 2000 year-old grave somewhere in the Mediterranean?

Don't think so. Ebola is a variant of the Marburg Virus which first caused hemorrhagic diseases in Germany (hence the name).

Digging up well known pathogens we have now might be problematic.
But chances are any "Dino bug" they made might find probably won't affect us.

That sounds logical. But research on viral DNA suggests that some viruses, such as retroviruses, could be as old as half a billion years. Yep, 250 million years before the dinosaurs. We have about 8% of our current genome fragments of these retroviruses.

I think it would be pretty hard to determine how infectious one of these ur-viruses would be to us now.

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But viruses (unlike bacteria and parasites) need exactly the right reseptors. Chances that those receptors are exactly the same on human cells as what ever creature that lived 10,50 or 250 million years ago, that that virus evolved to infect is very small.

Well that can't be totally true. For example, H5N1 is an avian flu that affects wild birds, aquatic birds (ducks and geese), and domesticated birds, like chickens.

However, they also affect many mammals, including Humans.

You don't need an exact receptor site. You need a site that is similar enough. The cell wall receptors of birds, mammals and humans seem to be close enough for the virus to bind to.

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The "flu" viruses are extremely adaptable and mutate at an extreme rate. And birds and humans living in close proximity for 10 000 years create a very different situation from a virus taken out of time for tens or hundreds of millions of years. It could be by dumb luck that the biochemistry of a modern Human happened to be very similar to a stegosaurus. But given the vast majority of modern viruses are not able to cross species/family it would be an astronomical happenstance (not that they don't happen)