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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PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE
2023
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ftjrc:oai:publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu:JRC131307 2024-02-04T10:03:52+01:00 Time-travelling pathogens and their risk to ecological communities STRONA Giovanni BRADSHAW Corey CARDOSO Pedro GOTELLI Nicholas GUILLAUME Frédéric MANCA Federica MUSTONEN Ville ZAMAN Luis 2023 Online https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC131307 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011268 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011268 eng eng PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE JRC131307 2023 ftjrc https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011268 2024-01-10T23:28:54Z 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. JRC.D.5 - Food Security Other/Unknown Material permafrost Joint Research Centre, European Commission: JRC Publications Repository PLOS Computational Biology 19 7 e1011268 |
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Joint Research Centre, European Commission: JRC Publications Repository |
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English |
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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. JRC.D.5 - Food Security |
author |
STRONA Giovanni BRADSHAW Corey CARDOSO Pedro GOTELLI Nicholas GUILLAUME Frédéric MANCA Federica MUSTONEN Ville ZAMAN Luis |
spellingShingle |
STRONA Giovanni BRADSHAW Corey CARDOSO Pedro GOTELLI Nicholas GUILLAUME Frédéric MANCA Federica MUSTONEN Ville ZAMAN Luis Time-travelling pathogens and their risk to ecological communities |
author_facet |
STRONA Giovanni BRADSHAW Corey CARDOSO Pedro GOTELLI Nicholas 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 SCIENCE |
publishDate |
2023 |
url |
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC131307 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011268 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011268 |
genre |
permafrost |
genre_facet |
permafrost |
op_relation |
JRC131307 |
op_doi |
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011268 |
container_title |
PLOS Computational Biology |
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19 |
container_issue |
7 |
container_start_page |
e1011268 |
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1789971675570241536 |