HONG KONG: While it might seem like a terrifying concept, scientists are about to bring a 30,000-year-old virus back from the dead in Siberia as a warning about the effects of climate change.
The team of French researchers who discovered the 30,000-year-old virus said Mollivirus sibericum, as it has been dubbed, is a gargantuan compared to its modern-day descendants with a length of 0.6 microns.
This puts it in the category of a giant virus as one that exceeds a length of 0.5 microns, or one-thousandth of a millimetre, and the team has detailed its findings in the journal PNAS.
M. sibericum is the fourth prehistoric virus to have been discovered since 2003, half of which were discovered by the French team who are now looking to bring the virus back to life in what would appear to be a plot from a horror film.
It is also significantly more complex than viruses of today with M. sibericum shown to have more than 500 genes, compared with the common Influenza A virus, which only has eight.
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