Time-travelling pathogens and their risk to ecological communities
Permafrost thawing and the potential ‘lab leak’ of ancient microorganisms generate risks of biological invasions for today’s ecological communities, including threats to human health via exposure to emergent pathogens. Whether and how such ‘time-travelling’ invaders could establish in modern communi...
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Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011268 https://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011268 |
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crplos:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011268 2024-05-19T07:47:12+00:00 Time-travelling pathogens and their risk to ecological communities Strona, Giovanni Bradshaw, Corey J. A. Cardoso, Pedro Gotelli, Nicholas J. Guillaume, Frédéric Manca, Federica Mustonen, Ville Zaman, Luis Antia, Rustom 2023 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011268 https://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011268 en eng Public Library of Science (PLoS) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ PLOS Computational Biology volume 19, issue 7, page e1011268 ISSN 1553-7358 journal-article 2023 crplos https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011268 2024-05-01T07:06:12Z Permafrost thawing and the potential ‘lab leak’ of ancient microorganisms generate risks of biological invasions for today’s ecological communities, including threats to human health via exposure to emergent pathogens. Whether and how such ‘time-travelling’ invaders could establish in modern communities is unclear, and existing data are too scarce to test hypotheses. To quantify the risks of time-travelling invasions, we isolated digital virus-like pathogens from the past records of coevolved artificial life communities and studied their simulated invasion into future states of the community. We then investigated how invasions affected diversity of the free-living bacteria-like organisms (i.e., hosts) in recipient communities compared to controls where no invasion occurred (and control invasions of contemporary pathogens). Invading pathogens could often survive and continue evolving, and in a few cases (3.1%) became exceptionally dominant in the invaded community. Even so, invaders often had negligible effects on the invaded community composition; however, in a few, highly unpredictable cases (1.1%), invaders precipitated either substantial losses (up to -32%) or gains (up to +12%) in the total richness of free-living species compared to controls. Given the sheer abundance of ancient microorganisms regularly released into modern communities, such a low probability of outbreak events still presents substantial risks. Our findings therefore suggest that unpredictable threats so far confined to science fiction and conjecture could in fact be powerful drivers of ecological change. Article in Journal/Newspaper permafrost PLOS PLOS Computational Biology 19 7 e1011268 |
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Permafrost thawing and the potential ‘lab leak’ of ancient microorganisms generate risks of biological invasions for today’s ecological communities, including threats to human health via exposure to emergent pathogens. Whether and how such ‘time-travelling’ invaders could establish in modern communities is unclear, and existing data are too scarce to test hypotheses. To quantify the risks of time-travelling invasions, we isolated digital virus-like pathogens from the past records of coevolved artificial life communities and studied their simulated invasion into future states of the community. We then investigated how invasions affected diversity of the free-living bacteria-like organisms (i.e., hosts) in recipient communities compared to controls where no invasion occurred (and control invasions of contemporary pathogens). Invading pathogens could often survive and continue evolving, and in a few cases (3.1%) became exceptionally dominant in the invaded community. Even so, invaders often had negligible effects on the invaded community composition; however, in a few, highly unpredictable cases (1.1%), invaders precipitated either substantial losses (up to -32%) or gains (up to +12%) in the total richness of free-living species compared to controls. Given the sheer abundance of ancient microorganisms regularly released into modern communities, such a low probability of outbreak events still presents substantial risks. Our findings therefore suggest that unpredictable threats so far confined to science fiction and conjecture could in fact be powerful drivers of ecological change. |
author2 |
Antia, Rustom |
format |
Article in Journal/Newspaper |
author |
Strona, Giovanni Bradshaw, Corey J. A. Cardoso, Pedro Gotelli, Nicholas J. Guillaume, Frédéric Manca, Federica Mustonen, Ville Zaman, Luis |
spellingShingle |
Strona, Giovanni Bradshaw, Corey J. A. Cardoso, Pedro Gotelli, Nicholas J. Guillaume, Frédéric Manca, Federica Mustonen, Ville Zaman, Luis Time-travelling pathogens and their risk to ecological communities |
author_facet |
Strona, Giovanni Bradshaw, Corey J. A. Cardoso, Pedro Gotelli, Nicholas J. Guillaume, Frédéric Manca, Federica Mustonen, Ville Zaman, Luis |
author_sort |
Strona, Giovanni |
title |
Time-travelling pathogens and their risk to ecological communities |
title_short |
Time-travelling pathogens and their risk to ecological communities |
title_full |
Time-travelling pathogens and their risk to ecological communities |
title_fullStr |
Time-travelling pathogens and their risk to ecological communities |
title_full_unstemmed |
Time-travelling pathogens and their risk to ecological communities |
title_sort |
time-travelling pathogens and their risk to ecological communities |
publisher |
Public Library of Science (PLoS) |
publishDate |
2023 |
url |
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011268 https://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011268 |
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permafrost |
genre_facet |
permafrost |
op_source |
PLOS Computational Biology volume 19, issue 7, page e1011268 ISSN 1553-7358 |
op_rights |
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
op_doi |
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011268 |
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PLOS Computational Biology |
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19 |
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7 |
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e1011268 |
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1799487540582940672 |