Time-travelling pathogens and their risk to ecological communities

• 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
• Other Authors: Ecological Data Science (Former group), Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences, Finnish Museum of Natural History, Zoology, Organismal and Evolutionary Biology Research Programme, Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Bioinformatics, Institute of Biotechnology, Department of Computer Science
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: PUBLIC LIBRARY OF SCIENCE 2023
• Subjects: 1181 Ecology; evolutionary biology; 11832 Microbiology and virology; Ice; permafrost
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10138/563908

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.Author summaryThe idea that ancient pathogens trapped in ice or hidden in remote laboratory facilities could break free-usually with catastrophic consequences for human beings-has been a fruitful source of inspiration for generations of science fiction novelists and screenwriters. However, the unprecedented rates of melting of glaciers and permafrost are now giving many types of ice-dormant microorganisms concrete opportunities to ...