Ice Caps Melt, Prehistoric Virus Escapes. No, It's Not a Movie.

A couple of months ago I talked about the connection between global warming and the Zika virus. Today I would like to discuss another interesting side effect we might observe in the next decades thanks to global warming. The ice caps will melt. Big deal, we already knew that. But have you ever thought of the stuff trapped in that ice that's going to thaw? What if some of that stuff isn't really dead, just dormant, waiting to come back? Sounds like fiction, but it's not. Up until a few years ago the general notion was that viruses were small. How small? Let's think in terms of genome units: viruses usually carry a handful of genes, either coded into DNA or RNA, and you can think of these as longs strings of four letters: A, C, T (or U if it's RNA), or G. The letters are called nucleotides, and the genome of most common viruses is typically in the order of tens of thousands of nucleotides long. By comparison, the human genome, with its 3 billion nucleotides, is enormous. The notion of viruses being "small" compared to living cells was turned upside down with the discovery of megaviruses in 2010 (over one million bases) and, in 2013, of the pandoraviruses, a family of viruses that can reach a staggering 2.5 million bases in genome size. Before you freak out: so far these gigantic viruses have only been found in unicellular organisms called amoebas, not in humans or any other animals. Amoebas acquire their nutrients through phagocytosis and that's also how the gigantic viruses...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news