Instant Genius - Zombie viruses in the Arctic, with Dr Arwyn Edwards

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

The world’s polar regions are melting. Beneath the ice lurks all kind of microbes, but how much of a threat do they really present? Microbiologist Dr Arwyn Edwards of Aberystwyth University joins us to explore the threat of so-called ‘zombie viruses’ and he explains where the real danger lies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water.

The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. In a place like Los Angeles, people don't stop being who they are. Writers, thinkers, creators, people with stories still unfolding.

That spirit lives on at Kingsley Manor, a community shaped by individuality, creativity, and lives well-lived. So when the conversation turns to what's next, it isn't about stepping away. It's about continuing the story. Explore your options at kingsley Manor.org, a nonprofit month-to-month senior community within the front of Hortch family. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease.

It's about quality. British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analog warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. From BBC, Science Focus, this is instant genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form.

I'm Daniel Bennett, the magazine's editor. And today we're digging in to the permafrost to find out what's emerging from the melting ice. According to a couple of recent papers, there could be some pretty deadly viruses out there buried in the planet's coldest places. And these regions melt rapidly as a result of climate change. There is concern that these viruses could trigger an epidemic or even a pandemic. To understand the risk and what's happening to the microbes that live in the polar regions as they undergo extreme climate change,

I'm joined by Dr. Arwin Edwards, a microbiologist from Amber Wistwyth University who investigates how these ecosystems affect the health of the planet. The reason I kind of wanted to dig into this subject is that there's been a number of headlines popping up in the latter half of this year made from a couple of studies that warned about the threat of what they called zombie viruses in the Arctic. So you're a microbiologist and I wanted to get kind of a local, I suppose, a person from the UK because these were Canadians and French scientists published. the study. What's the concern around these viruses? So the concern is that as the architect is changing very rapidly, it's warming. Some people might say it's going through a meltdown. That means that things that have been stored in deep frozen environments in the Arctic. So frozen ground, in particular

permafrost, which is going to be frozen for hundreds of thousands of years, or glaciers and ice sheets, such as the green and ice sheet, the only ice sheet in the Arctic, they are being melted. And things that are stored in that deep freezer emerge on the surface into a warmed environment. And the concern that's posed by a number of these studies is that those microbes and those viruses in particular have not been seen for some time and could pose a threat because we don't know what they are. So there is a concern that they could even cause a pandemic or something of that kind. And this is something that's kind of informed by a lot of science fiction really in terms of our prevailing fuse of these things. And whether it bears out

scientific fact is open to considerable question. So interestingly, the viruses that they uncovered, I believe there was something called a Pandora virus and a Pac-Man virus. Were these the kind of things that are dangerous to us? No. So these viruses are fantastic names. I do always like viruses because they have some most amazing names. But as scary as something called Pandora virus sounds, it is absolutely entirely positively harmless to you and me. It is only a threat if you are a soil amoeba. So if you're a tiny microscopic creature that is found in soils all over the world and is likely being killed by its viruses regularly within the soil, you know, there are 10 to the 30 estimated virus infections that go on across the world at any point in time, any second.

That's an impossibly huge number. Huge huge number. And that's dominated by viruses infecting microbes in the environment, particularly microbes in the sea. That's where that figure comes from. We just don't really know about soil. We can assume because there's lots of microbes in there, lots of soil viruses as well, that there's a huge number of virus infections of soil microbes going on. only is this entirely natural, entirely harmless to us, it is actually essential for the ecosystem

function of these environments that our viruses there killing off microbes and releasing the carbon and nutrients inside those microbes. So it's entirely fine. So to be very, very clear, there is no public health threat from viruses that infect amoeba. Whether you find those viruses in the Arctic, whether you find them elsewhere in soil, it's really, really bad news. If this were being broadcast to a bunch of soil and maybe, yeah, the listeners would be right to be worried, but to us it's fine. It is illustrative, though, of just the weird and wonderful world of viruses and microbes that's out there, just how really ignorant, and I say this with great level of humility as somebody who's dedicated his professional life to understanding microbes

and viruses, the great level of ignorance that we have about these things. It's very, very difficult to do a David Attenborough type documentary on these things, and to bring them to life. So, yeah, it does sound scary, particularly with a name like Pandora virus, but yeah, the actual public health concern is zero from those particular viruses. And they illustrate the lack of knowledge that we have. Yeah, so the ones that we've mostly found tend to be these kind of harmless, mostly harmless viruses unless you're an amoeba. But there is a small, very slight chance that there could be some nasty things frozen. Is that correct? Like things like smallpox?

Is that a concern that we might find a body or a carcass, you know, thawing out and a reindeer might come across it, for example? Yeah. So, yeah, this is an interesting one to consider, and it's helpful to just put smallpox next to the Pandora virus as an example here. So viruses are obviously very tiny, and they are very simple in construction. But there you've got two of the most complicated kinds of viruses

in terms of the structure that you've got. And the reason we can go back and pull out these amoeba infecting viruses, the peddora virus, the Pacman virus and so on, is they are made from very tough constituents, allow them to survive for a very long period of time. Smallpox is also quite a tough virus, but it's not as tough as these amoeba infecting viruses. So it has, on its outer layer, it's basically a little fat bubble.

It's called an envelope virus, and then inside that there are proteins, and inside that there's the gene. genome of the smallpox virus. So while smallpox is, you know, amongst the world of human pathogens, quite a tough virus, it is nowhere as tough as these amoebe infecting viruses. And, you know, when people have looked back at frozen samples of these viruses, they are perhaps stable for decades and, you know, the longer term storage becomes very unlikely. And, you know, the last, you know, case of smallpox was in Birmingham, I believe, in something like 1979. So, you know,

the, we've run down the clock on that one quite well. At the other end of the scale, then, you've got flu, which of course is infecting lots of people right now, and we're concerned about avian influenza because infecting lots of birds right now. The world, you know, the spread of avian influenza is causing real concern to veterinary scientists. And that's a much smaller virus, and it's much more fragile virus. And so this is where the story is. kind of really began was with researchers looking into permafrost to find victims from the 1918 pandemic of the Spanish flu. And so there's just kind of like three attempts that were made. And the big one was to go to a place that I now know very, very well, called Longyabin up in Spalbard,

which is about a thousand miles from the North Pole. And it's technically impossible to die in Longybin. And quite simply that's because there's no way of burying you in Longybin because they would be digging into the permafrost, which is thawing very, very rapidly. So, you know, you can be immortal as long as you've been. But going back a century, going back to 1918, there were people being buried in permafrost there, and there were Spanish flu victims being buried in the permafrost. And there was a major effort in the 1990s to go and safely, you know, lots of lots of precautions they can go and extract and exume some of these victims to see if they could recover traces of the virus. And this failed totally. it was impossible to do.

And the techniques that we have for looking for viruses and trying to analyze them have come on in leaps and bounds. And in the 1990s, there were techniques that allow you to really sensitively detect tiny traces of the virus's genome. And they couldn't even do that. So if that was gone, the viruses were totally gone. But this brought people out to the shadows a little bit. And it transpired. There had been an attempt in the 1950s as well, which, you know, the past is a different country. But there was a researcher who was doing his PhD who went to,

Alaska, I think basically like with a shovel and a surgical mask and got the permission to exhumed some people who died from the Spanish flu. And in those days, to cultivate viruses, as still is the case for flu and making flu vaccines, you would inject them into fertilised eggs. And there's this wonderful photograph of this guy having collected samples from a victim of the Spanish flu. And he's siphoning samples of this person's lung and pippeting, mouth pippetting it into the eggs. And I use this photograph and I teach new students about lab safety

because it is absolutely lab safety one-on-one. You would not do that for anything, for tap water, let alone a virus that killed, you know, estimated 40 million to 100 million people depending on which, you know, kind of thing. So it was dead. It was very, very dead in 1950. So I think the chances of either smallpox or Spanish flu coming out from frozen storage

in permafrost or places is, practically zero. Sorry, I still got that image. Well, I've got no hands free. I guess I'll just have to matter. You'll have to send me that image. That's quite something. So it's a good excuse and to just sort of talk about viruses a little bit. And how are they able to do this kind of resurrection act? Is resurrection even the right word for it? Because I mean, there's this, you know, question marks of whether we can describe virus. as alive in the first place. But how are they able to just sort of sit somewhere for hundreds of years and spring back up?

But you've hinted actually they aren't as tough as we maybe think from science fiction anyway. Yeah. So some of them are very, very fragile and they become in activated. I mean, in political palates, I'd say they die, but you're right, viruses are not strictly alive, therefore they're not strictly able to be dead. But, you know, outside of a living cell, a cell that they're able to influence, fact, they are inert. And if stored carefully and properly, they can be infective for a very, very long period of time. But, you know, that's within the controlled situation of a lab.

It's very different than in terms of, you know, something that's died and, you know, has been buried in the soil or something of that kind. But to recover them, there's kind of two ways that can be done. And there is the classical way, which is attempting to isolate and propagate the virus in cell lines and in artificial cultures of living cells. I mentioned hens eggs there for the influenza virus. That's very well-established techniques in virology. But there was a really interesting paper coming out from a team based in the US in something like 2014-2015, where they've gone to Arctic Canada and they've found these environments which they call ice patches.

And these are not conventional glaciers. They're just hollows and depressions in the ground which collect ice and store ice for periods of time. And it's not flowing like a conventional glacier. But because they persist year-round, they're often really literally cool places to hang out for wildlife. So reindeer and caribou like to go to these places to avoid biting insects, which is then wonderful because if you have a diet that's subsistent on caribu, you can go and hunt them there. So, you know, there's a rich history of the animals using these ice patches, and there's also humans hunting them in these places.

And in Norway, I've visited some of these sites where you can live, literally see a half-meter-thick layer of reindeer dung, has been collected for over 5,000 years, but also archaeological artefacts from, you know, hunters' arrows and spears and stuff coming out with it and things like that. But these researchers in Canada went to one of these ice patches, and they took a sample. And they did something very different,

which was not to try and grow the viruses directly, but instead to sequence viral genomes. And then you can effectively, once you have the sequence of something, is I'd describe it as a mail-order company. It's a little bit more nuanced than that, but to mail you artificially generated copies of that. And so they spied what they thought were viruses amongst the sequences that they looked at.

And I thought, oh, that looks interesting. We don't know what it does, but we'll get it through the mail-order company, and then we'll just try infecting things until it grows in something. And so they had to guess that one thing could infect insect cells. So they tried with insect cells, and then they tried plants for some other things. And to me, that's actually posing some more concerns, because your virus genomes might be a lot more stable than the infectivity of the virus themselves. So they might be harmful for longer.

But also, this is then taking it out from the very remote, low population density, four million people live across the entirety of the Arctic into a lab that might be in the middle of a major city. and the way that you do these infections is to take the genome that's been reconstituted, treated in a particular way, into a syringen needle, and inject it into something. So to me, that's a little bit more sketchy. So we do need to have a debate about what's appropriate in terms of actually literally resurrecting viruses that are not just unculturable by normal means, but are fragmented and only recognisable by genome sequences that we don't understand. Yeah, you're just seeing a sort of formula for something that you have a rough idea and then you go ask someone to make it in the middle of Massachusetts or somewhere.

It's also a really good opportunity to talk about your particular area. I mean, you studied, you know, microbiology in the Arctic, but a little bit more generally, which is sort of, obviously the Arctic, like everywhere on Earth has its own. set of microbes or its own particular makeup of microbes. And, you know, these are, I guess, coming out of the permafrost as it melts into the water system. What do we know about what basically we're likely to see as the Arctic melts? What do we know about the kind of microbes that are being released and how they're going to change that ecosystem? And I appreciate as I ask it, that's an absolutely massive question. It's a critical question to ask, actually,

because we really do need to appreciate that microbes govern so many of the biological processes on this planet. Every second breath that we take is using oxygen from marine plankton. It's not just the trees that we can see. It's the invisible stuff that's out there. And the Arctic is just the same in that microbes play really key roles there. The thing is, though, that because microbes are very nice, numerous, they're very small, and relative to the other things that are growing and living in the

Arctic, they can respond to change quite quickly. So, you know, the generation time of a polar bear is measured in years, the generation time of a microbe that might be growing the permafrost once it's able to resume growth, might be measured in days, weeks or months. So they are from the first things that respond to change in the environment. And that change can be just a few degrees between something being just below zero and frozen and just above zero and they're being liquid melt water. So they're really, really sensitive indicators of changes in the Arctic for that reason. But they're not just indicators of change. They're also, unfortunately for us, things that drive feedbacks in the change as well. So they can amplify that change. And this was

an idea that was put forward by a really great paper published by a research name Warwick Vincent in 2010, which describes architect. microbes as sentinels and amplifiers of climate change. And so there's that second side of it, amplifying climate change, where they govern processes which then can run away and contribute further to climate change. So, you know, really key ones include all that carbon that's stored in the permafrost, not just the, you know, minuscule amounts of carbon represented by viruses stored in the permafrost, but everything else that's buried there is the soil organic carbon, vast, vast quantity, something like a third. Athumptory, something like a thornful.

third of the world's sole carbon is up there. That's been carbon that's been locked away and stable and cold for a long time. But if something comes along, because it's warmed a little bit and it's warm enough to breathe that organic carbon out, converted to carbon dioxide, that's putting it into the atmosphere. So that's a carbon feedback there. But of particular concern is it's not just carbon dioxide that can be emitted through that process. Other microbes can release methane, which is a really potent greenhouse gas.

So, you know, you get to these environments and they're literally belching out methane from the ground because of microbial processes there, which then drives further climate warming. And the thing that's really alarming about the Arctic is, of course, everywhere is warming. But for a long time, we've thought that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as other parts of the planet. But it's probably closer to three or four times. And parts of the Arctic, such as part where I mostly work on Swalbod, it's probably closer to seven times fast. of warming. So it is really concerning because that change then enables these microbes to kick back in and cause problems downstream. So it strikes me as a massive undertaking to try and understand this when you think about the numbers, the sheer amounts of microbes and the different

places in the world where you can collect these and understand them. Could you kind of give a snapshot of how we actually try and understand what you've just explained, how we actually can get a better picture of what's going to happen as these microbes were released and start munching on things and belching out carbon. Yeah, so to try and understand how microbes are changing the Arctic, it requires balancing between going to the Arctic and then doing clever things in labs. And the way that this has conventionally been done is researchers from outside the Arctic, go to the Arctic, and collect samples, take measurements, set up experiments, some of these experiments are wonderful that they've been going for years, sometimes decades,

perhaps simulating the impact of climate change and then comparing what's going on. And then they return samples back to their own labs and they analysed them. And different techniques are so there's some very sophisticated approaches in DNA sequencing that are very relevant to understanding this. And just trying to stitch together the genomes, the organisms that are found in these environments give us some insights into what their potential metabolism is, what their contributions to carbon cycle might be, how vulnerable they might need to climate change, but also not just that, but actual experiments aimed at understanding how they function under different conditions.

And a lot of this stuff is of fundamental interest, because if the Arctic weren't changing, it would be important to study it because we need to understand how life survives in the cold. But we've got this additional challenge now later on top of it, that cold is going away and it's going away in large parts over the rest of the century. So yeah, we have to work across different scales from understanding what's going on inside an individual cell and the genome inside that cell through to its micro habitat, which might be a few millionths of a meter in size, through to the test tube scale size, you know, little experiments in the lab, through to the field scale experiments where people are going out and

watering plots or adding carbon dioxide to it, then to the entire architect. So there's a huge scaling up thing being done there. And a lot of what we've been doing in recent years, accepting the pandemic has been to try and bring things together so that that sophisticated DNA sequencing approach, you don't have to bring things back to the lab anymore. You can actually take that with you to the field. So it becomes more efficient to do in the field and reduce the carbon impact of the work as well because, you know, running cold labs and running ultra-freezers is really carbon-intensive, not just the process of flying there and back as well.

And do you, are you able, I'm going to sort of share my ignorance here on these DNA sequencing techniques, but are you uncovering or discovering new microbes that are new to science and that, because I know obviously there's a big area where we're sort of studying and trying to discover new microbes that might be useful all the time. And I just wondered, is there the same sort of emphasis out there in the Arctic that we might discover things that, you know, are really good at, I don't know, eating plastic or that's a bit of a pipe cream. So every time we do a DNA sequencing experiment, I get the initial results back and, you know, a large percentage of what I'm looking at just comes back as unknown. And that requires a lot of effort

then to try and dig in to see what that actually is. And it's often many, many different things. And some of the things I have to be content with are unknown now and will be unknown for a long time. And it feels a little bit like the early days of astronomy. You recognize a few constellations out there, but there's a vast galaxy of stuff that is just not on our radar. So it's an important part of the work to actually try and build our reference databases better so that we can actually recognize things as what they are. And that's really slow painstaking work compared to, you know,

the horrors of going and wading through, you know, hip, deep snow in Arctic blizzards and whatever, whatever image people have of architect scientists, the hard work is actually, you know, the painstaking stuff of building up these reference databases. So there's always new stuff out there. Some of that may be useful. You know, if somebody asks me, you know,

so what, Owen, why should we invest in this research? I have to say the next penicillin could come from a glacier or it could come from the permafrost. You know, we only benefit from having a better understanding of the diversity, the biodiversity of these places. So, yeah, there's a lot of interest in terms of finding things like the next penicillin, but also more everyday things like biological washing powders. So if you've got enzymes in biological washing powders that work at lower temperatures,

then you can save the energy and the carbon that goes into that process. So it makes more efficient. And by the same token, lots of industrial processes that use enzymes as well. If you can optimize those to go ahead at ambient temperature, rather than needing to be heated to 30, 50, 60 degrees Celsius, you're saving right. now a lot of money. Yeah, yeah. And I wondered, when you have these samples, are you also able to look at them and find out a bit more about perhaps the sort of time that they were phrasing in? Yes, yes and no. So we can split these habitats into two components, really. There are habitats

which are deep frozen stores of things. And there may be some changes that occur. Even in the coldest frozen environments, there will be some changes that occur because there are things that can still be active, well below zero degrees Celsius. But the rate of those changes are really slow. So they can reflect much more of the conditions

when the organisms were inoculated into that environment, be it through snowfall or burying of organisms within soil and so on. But there's also a huge range of habitats which are highly active. And they're still living. They're contemporary organisms. They're doing contemporary things. And so the surface of the soils, the surface of the glaciers and, of course, into lakes and rivers and streams and the sea, those are very active contemporary environments. So it's interesting to consider the boundary between that life in a slow lane.

I will never say that it's zero, deep frozen, absolutely locked away. life in the slow lane and then bang into the fast lane of the contemporary architect, which is melting very rapidly. So we can get clues from the kinds of organisms that we see. And we can reconstruct the population dynamics of these things and what environments might be like. And there's a wonderful paper which has just come out in nature, which I really do need to read very carefully, where researchers have gone to the bottle of green light sheet and they've been able to reconstruct what the habitats were like, two million years ago because they could still just about get some DNA out of it and do a lot of clever things with that and see that they were mastered on and that kind of thing. So, you know,

you can learn a lot by sequencing things from the Arctic. Yeah, it's amazing how much that technology has unlocked really where you can kind of shotgun sequence big, big volumes of stuff. Just lastly then, I'd love to get your kind of anecdotal of you because I know you've been heading out to the Arctic for some decades now. And I think it's sometimes, I know, you know, from person experience, just seeing these places, I think, really strikes at home how much they're changing. What's your take on it? And particularly, I suppose, because we're talking about microbes, in a way, it can be easy to think of them as just, you know, buried in invisible. But they are actually, at least as I understand it, they are actually changing things like the tree line,

for instance, in the Arctic, where that starts and where life starts. What's your view on it over these few decades? Yeah, so I was really fortunate to kind of stumble into Arctic science around 2006, and I've been going regularly to the Arctic and other cold places since then. And so I still feel like I'm very new. And when I talk to people who have been going for many decades, you know, they've got their own stories to tell. But what I think frightens me a little bit is that in that 15, 16 years, I have started to see some really significant changes in the Arctic environment. And, you know, the thing that's frightening about that is it's such a short time scale, you know, not even a lifetime, but part of a scientist career. And, you know, and the thing that's

And yeah, it's sometimes little things like rain. And it's a nice, beautiful, sunny day here in Aberystworth at the moment, chilling me cold, but sunny. But sometimes our sunshine comes in liquid form here in West Wales. So I'm no stranger to rain. And when I first went to the Arctic, the rain was a different kind of rain. And it was sort of large spots here and there. And before you knew it, you were soaking wet.

Now the rain is much more Welsh in its character. So it's sometimes little things. things like that, or the conversation with a wonderfully experienced true polar hero named Nick Cox, who until recently ran our only research station in the Arctic. And when I was going there for the first time, we said, you know, dress for a cold day in the Scottish mountains in summer, plus four degrees Celsius. And this summer I was walking across the tundra, and I was just realizing that my field gear was just far too warm for me.

It was up at 16 degrees Celsius, and it was crossed to 23 degrees Celsius there. recently. And, you know, I've just come back from the Arctic. I was there doing work in Polar Night, which is the fastest warming part of the calendar in the Arctic. And I was amazed to find temperatures of about plus four at its warmest. And, you know, this is in 24-hour darkness. It should be below zero, well below zero. There should be snow on the ground. But it was, instead it was rainy and it was dark. And I was wearing the kind of clothes that I normally wear walking around in the summer, traditionally in the summer. So, yeah, there's a lot of variability in the climate that you have there.

But when you start to talk to people who've worked there for 20, 30 years and you encounter something strange, and you say, have you seen this before? And they say, no, this is nuts. I've heard that so many times than last yet, this is nuts. and they're quite a reserved, well they're slightly mad, but they don't say that lightly, do they? No, no, no, there's very little tolerance for people that over-eg these things, so I always trying to be quite cautious in what they say. And I would emphasise it can rain, say, on Spalabard any month of the year, but the frequency

and the intensity and the duration of these events are changing. And so, you know, when you put things together, the rain has changed. The fjords are not longer freezing over. There's, you know, heat waves in the Arctic that are, frankly, terrifying. And I see the glaciers being absolutely hammered by this. I was working on one site this summer where I was able to visit it in March, early July and in August. And, you know, just between early July and August, we'd put. some poles in standard technique to measure how much melt is going on and the poles had all melted

out because there was well over a meter of melt within about 40 days there so you know pretty intensive melt which is from a small glacier um it's not going to appreciably raise sea levels globally um but it's really a barometer of the kind of conditions that you know we can expect to see elsewhere in the Arctic and you know as the planet warms so it's concerning and it takes a toll actually um I now no longer regard myself as a biologist of the Arctic. I'm more of a pathologist of the Arctic. It feels like every time I go to these field sites, it's a little bit like turning up to a crime scene.

That was Dr. Arwin Edwards from Aberystwyth University, talking about the meltdown of the polar landscape. Thank you for listening. The Instant Genius podcast is brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sound now in supermarkets and news agents as well as on your preferred app store. Alternatively, do come find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and

emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Need skills for the job market now? Santa Monica College offers career programs you can complete in as little as to four semesters. Get job ready with flexible classes and real world training. Enroll for summer at SMC.edu.