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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Published in:PLOS Computational Biology
Main Authors: Strona, Giovanni, Bradshaw, Corey J. A., Cardoso, Pedro, Gotelli, Nicholas J., Guillaume, Frédéric, Manca, Federica, Mustonen, Ville, Zaman, Luis
Format: Text
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10374110/
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011268
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spelling ftpubmed:oai:pubmedcentral.nih.gov:10374110 2023-08-20T04:09:14+02:00 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 2023-07-27 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10374110/ https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011268 en eng Public Library of Science http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10374110/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011268 © 2023 Strona et al https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. PLoS Comput Biol Research Article Text 2023 ftpubmed https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011268 2023-07-30T01:11:26Z 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. Text permafrost PubMed Central (PMC) PLOS Computational Biology 19 7 e1011268
institution Open Polar
collection PubMed Central (PMC)
op_collection_id ftpubmed
language English
topic Research Article
spellingShingle Research Article
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
topic_facet Research Article
description 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.
format Text
author Strona, Giovanni
Bradshaw, Corey J. A.
Cardoso, Pedro
Gotelli, Nicholas J.
Guillaume, Frédéric
Manca, Federica
Mustonen, Ville
Zaman, Luis
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
publishDate 2023
url http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10374110/
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011268
genre permafrost
genre_facet permafrost
op_source PLoS Comput Biol
op_relation http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10374110/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011268
op_rights © 2023 Strona et al
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
op_doi https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011268
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