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From the start, Jean-Michel Claverie apologizes. “You won’t see anything out of the ordinary here. » We are located on the Luminy University campus, twenty minutes from the center of Marseille, in the Laboratory of Genome and Structural Information. Inaugurated in 2006, the site was conceived, designed and planned by Claverie, a 73-year-old virologist and now emeritus professor of medicine, and his wife Chantal Abergel, an experimental biologist who manages the laboratory’s operations. Claverie was educated in San Diego with Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning biologist and author of the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA, and traveled notably in the United States and Canada before settling in this place with Chantal Abergel, which is like a others look laboratory. Only in appearance.
“There are a lot of things with pipes everywhere here.” he explains. It is stated that there is equipment worth 2 million euros in a room measuring ten tiny square meters. “Here is a room where viruses are isolated from the cold, from the Arctic, from the Antarctic. Here we cultivate bacteria; There it is a biochemistry workshop. The samples are then sent to the synchrotrons in Grenoble in the Paris region of Germany. There are centrifuges, hoods to protect against contamination, refrigerators, gene readers, two freezers at -80°C in which permafrost samples are stored. » The scientist then shows another room, closed. You must be equipped to enter. What is it for ? “To find out whether the viruses we have isolated can infect people. » At the end of the visit we sit in the office of the co-owner of the premises. Pieces of mammoth tusks and a woolly rhinoceros vertebrae lie on a shelf.
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Time bombs
What interests the Claverie-Abergel couple above all are the very (very) old viruses. They have funny names: Pandora virus, Megavirus, Pithovirus, Mimivirus, Mollivirus sibericum and are tens of thousands of years old. Most occur in the Siberian permafrost (or permafrost). This geological term refers to soils whose temperature remains below 0 °C for more than two consecutive years. It makes up 20% of the Earth’s surface and is found mostly in Russia. Permafrost is covered by a layer of soil that thaws in summer, allowing vegetation to develop. But with climate change, permafrost is melting, knowing that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. But it is full of viruses, each more worrying than the other…
“The clearest example are viruses from the family of Asfarviridae one representative of which is responsible for swine fever, with a mortality rate of 100% in certain strains! explains Chantal Abergel. This type of virus is transmitted by ticks, which significantly increases its spread. We also detect many viruses, including Some, as yet unknown, could be contagious to other animals. The most dangerous are ancient, never characterized viruses, some of which may have been involved in the extinction of large mammals at the end of the Pleistocene. Mammoths, woolly rhinos and… Neanderthals! »
The shark metaphor
Apparently the permafrost, this attic of ancient and giant viruses, is taking on the appearance of a time bomb. Especially because it suffers from Russia’s industrial exploitation of the Arctic by drilling huge wells 800 meters in diameter and 300 meters deep to extract its resources. And forced design of sea routes, always for commercial or industrial purposes. “But the more the deep layers of permafrost are exhumed, the less we know about their microbial content. warns Chantal Abergel. This is less about the direct melting of the permafrost, which remains superficial, and more about the gradual disappearance of sea ice along the Arctic coasts, of which Russia has the largest part. The danger has been proven because traces of viruses that can infect animals have been detected. The likelihood of a chance encounter with a sensitive host therefore only increases with time, even if it is not quantifiable. »
On the other side of the planet, in Antarctica, other ancient and giant viruses have been located. An Italian team led by Dr. Michael Tangherlini, responsible for a mission titled “Diversity and ecological role of giant viruses in Antarctica,” located viruses in marine sediments at a depth of 1,103 meters. However, since there is no human or animal life in these depths, this is not a cause for concern. A virus that returns to the surface but does not encounter human or animal presence dies after a few hours. But in the opposite case? To explain the risk, Jean-Michel Claverie uses the metaphor of the shark: “As long as it swims in distant waters, it is not a problem. If it gets too close to the beaches, it becomes a danger. The same applies to viruses. If they live away from any human presence, the risk is zero. But once they’re exposed to us, it’s not the same. » But in Russia the danger is growing day by day. This leads, for example, to the release of anthrax, which was responsible for the deaths of thousands of reindeer in the summer of 2016. The infectious disease caused by bacteria called anthrax is believed to have killed one child and infected dozens more people. “The Russians will exploit the underground in regions where the Inuit historically know not to go. » In the far north we can also find traces of Lyme disease, chikungunya,Escherichia coliamong other things, celebrations…
The WHO takes things seriously
“If Neanderthals died of an unknown viral disease 50,000 years ago and this virus reappears, then it is also dangerous for us, continues Jean-Michel Claverie. If new diseases emerge from the Arctic, we will be unprepared to deal with them. We don’t know what to expect, our immune system is not prepared at all. When we see the global chaos caused by the coronavirus, we are talking about a much larger scourge. » In recent years, Russian teams have achieved two miracles. A plant grew from a 30,000-year-old seed. Buried in the permafrost, it was just waiting to wake up and germinate. Even an earthworm that had been frozen for tens of thousands of years was somehow brought back to life simply by being given water before coming back to life. “If a seed or a worm can survive for 30,000 years, so can a virus.” announces Jean-Michel Claverie. Through one of their speakers, Dr. Margaret Harris, the World Health Organization (WHO) recently stated that it was taking things seriously: “WHO is working with more than 300 scientists to review the evidence for all families of viruses and bacteria that can cause epidemics and pandemics, including those that can be released during thawing.” permafrost”, she explained. However, no contact has been established between Geneva, where the WHO is based, and Marseille. “Our results will be published in specialist journals that are accessible to everyone without barriers. Precisely Chantal Abergel. We believe that it is the responsibility of the scientific oversight of these organizations to contact us for possible application and not the other way around. Our job is to explore the unknown. It’s up to them to draw the consequences. But the few programs that we know of exist are all focused on monitoring diseases from the south (malaria, chikungunya, tularemia, etc.) that are gradually colonizing the northern hemisphere. » The opposite point of view, that of detecting the emergence of an unknown disease from the north, is currently not taken seriously and has no international budget. Claverie and Abergel nevertheless call for the establishment of one “Hygiene cordon” around the Arctic. “Perhaps within the framework of the UArctic consortium, which brings together a large number of universities, including Aix-Marseille, and which could be more responsive than institutions like the WHO.” concludes the researcher.
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