The search for viruses is part of the Arctic Floating University-2024 (APU-2024) expedition. It takes place on board the research vessel Professor Molchanov.
According to the TASS news agency correspondent who is part of the expedition, scientists have already taken water samples on an oceanological section from Cape Flora on Northbrook Island of Franz Josef Land to Russkaya Gavan of Novaya Zemlya. The expedition overcame difficult weather conditions and is moving home to Russkaya Gavan Bay. Under favorable circumstances, scientists and the ship's crew will make a quick landing on land.
Oceanologists are carrying water samples taken at different depths at 14 stations using a rosette with barometers. When immersed, the instruments measure temperature and salinity, and take samples for oxygen content and other hydrochemical parameters. Then they take water from different horizons and bottom sediments - they will be checked for the content of microplastics, heavy metals, organic pollutants, radionuclides, and plankton.
In the samples, scientists expect to see giant viruses, the sizes of which are comparable to the sizes of bacteria. Such viruses even have their own parasite viruses, virophages. These giant viruses are being specifically searched for in the Arctic by Russian microbiologists for the first time.
I would like to find new representatives of this group, new giant viruses. I plan to collect soil samples, I have already collected seawater samples. Next, I plan to check these samples for the presence of giant virus representatives, either to grow them in culture and look for them in culture, or to confirm their presence using molecular methods. That is, for example, to set up PCR with primers to conservative regions of their genome.
For Russia, research on these viruses on its territory, if discovered, will be innovative. And the very concept of giant viruses is relatively young for world science: the first of them was discovered only in 2003. Several of their genera have already been discovered around the world.
According to Artemiy Goncharov, head of the laboratory of functional genomics and proteomics of microorganisms at the Institute of Experimental Medicine, it is not yet clear in world science whether to classify giant viruses as viruses, or as a separate category, since "most likely, this is something developing in parallel, because they have very few genes in common with traditional viruses."
Some DNA samples of giant viruses, in particular, have already sometimes been found in laboratories in the material of patients with respiratory infections. And scientists saw some of the giant viruses on Russian territory in samples taken from fossil animals in the permafrost of Yakutia.
It is not yet known whether these viruses are capable of causing any infections in humans and mammals.
Because if it is a harmless virus, then, most likely, the main direction of research is the study of its evolutionary history. If there are any characteristics that allow it to be a pathogen, then it is necessary to organize epidemiological studies in order to see whether, for example, the DNA of these viruses has been found in people with various forms of pathology.
According to him, scientists in Russia and the world are still only at the stage of accumulating information about giant viruses.
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