PERMATHREAT

Forecasting the climatic and health consequences of global warming on permafrost environments

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 Obiettivo del progetto (Objective)

'Fifteen percent of the world’s soil carbon stock is currently kept frozen in permafrost soils from the arctic region. Recent climatic projections have indicated that this environment is particularly at risk due to global warming, with up to 90% of the near surface that could be thawed by 2100. Related revival in microbial activities could initiate the most dangerous amplifying feedback in the entire carbon cycle, boosting global warming as a result of a massive release in greenhouse gas. Permafrost also represent a potentially massive repository of viruses, genes and naked DNA fragments, that sometimes have been preserved in situ for up to hundreds of thousands years. While representing a fantastic potential for innovative biotechnological applications, this genetic reservoir could turn as a major threat to human health as once thawed, vast amounts of new antibiotic-resistant determinants might be made available for horizontal gene transfer, promoting the emergence of new resistant pathogens worldwide. The potential extent of greenhouse gas production and bacterial outbreaks will ultimately depend of the metabolic, cellular and molecular complexity present in permafrost. Here, we propose to characterize the permafrost microbial and viral communities, as well as the extent of the antibiotic resistome, using massively parallel next-generation sequencing. In addition, ancient DNA technologies will be used in order to track back permafrost response to previous episodes of global warming, which will serve as a proxy for the ongoing global warming. This project will reveal the true balance between sources and sinks of greenhouse gas in permafrost. Potential future escape routes to current therapeutic agents will be identified through the characterization of new allelic variants in major antibiotic resistance genes; hence, this project will improve our ability to predict and fight the future effects of global warming and related emergence of new infection types.'

Introduzione (Teaser)

EU researchers have developed a new method to study the microbes present in permafrost using the genomes of modern and ancient horses.

Descrizione progetto (Article)

Permafrost in the Northern Hemisphere holds a vast array of ancient genetic material, including potentially dangerous bacteria and viruses. With global warming predicted to melt large parts of the permafrost, it is vital to understand exactly which microbes are frozen below the surface.

The EU-funded 'Forecasting the climatic and health consequences of global warming on permafrost environments' (PERMATHREAT) project addressed this problem by using next-generation sequencing to identify bacteria and viruses within the permafrost.

Researchers first developed a comparative approach, which allowed them to separate various populations of microbes within a sample. Their method was used for the rest of the project, which involved researchers extracting DNA from the remains of ancient horses, frozen in the permafrost. This was compared to DNA from modern horses to spot differences in the bacteria and viruses present in the samples.

As part of this work, PERMATHREAT has discovered how Siberian horses have adapted to extremely cold climates over time. The project has also described the genetic diversity of a rare horse breed, Przewalski's horse, for the first time.

The work of PERMATHREAT has provided new ways to understand the biodiversity of microbes in permafrost. This will help in adjusting to the environmental changes expected over the coming decades.