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this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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Most of those should be bacteria, not a virus. I would speculate that they would be much easier to treat with common antibiotics. After all, they haven't had time to adapt and become drug resistant.... Yet.
Micro-evolution is fucking wild.
In the linked experiment, it takes bacteria 11 days to evolve resistance to 1000x the concentration of antibiotics normally needed to kill it. This is basically the concern with overuse of antibiotics in healthcare, hygiene products, and livestock - that 0.001% of bacteria your soap doesn't kill is basically the Superman of bacteria, and you just killed all its competition, leaving it free to replicate into its own little army.
A high enough dosage of literally anything is toxic / eventually fatal for humans, so we can't just keep upping the concentration of antibiotic medication. There's even a term for it - "post-antibiotic era", which we're already knee-deep into.
Anyway, yeah most ancient microbes would be absolutely destroyed by all the modern natural and artificial means that have developed to kill it... the catch being that if the microbe is old enough, things haven't developed to kill it, so the current state of our immune systems and medical tech could amount to an all-you-can-eat-buffet for something that didn't develop adjacent to us. Combine that with a few weeks of petri-dish-experiment of ancient microbe incubating in some immunocompromised old man who decides he's tired of staying home sick and wants to go out christmas shopping for his family... and now we have a problem.
I have jokingly said that for years about the marketing on soaps and nobody believed me. :)
Micro-evolution is absolutely crazy though. I started learning about that with fungi; mycelium specifically. Those little things can shift their genetics lightning fast. If they are exposed to different nutrient sources or growing conditions, life.. uh.. finds a way. There is a debate that is going on right now about the whole naming convention of fungi being broken since fruit characteristics aren't telling a complete enough picture. While most strains of, say, pink oyster mushrooms can produce the exact same fruit they might have wildly different genetic markers while still behaving like they are from the same strain.
I think this was discovered when mycologists tried to import some mycelium into New Zealand. Different batches of mycelium were comming from the same exact strain and lineage but when it was tested for import, the genetics were too far off to match to a "legally importable" strain.
Genetic "drift" is well known. After duplicating the same strain over a number of years from petri dish to petri dish, the mycelium just adapts to a cheap and easy agar food source and its fruiting tendencies may suffer as a result. What is new, is how fast it can actually happen in the wild without it going through the genetic lottery of spore combination.
(Disclaimer: I am horrendously tired right now and I tend to jumble factoids in this state. Slap me if I got something horribly wrong.)
We saw it in real time, accidentally, in a microbiology class I took.
Lab final was basically "swab this mystery petri dish, run some tests, and tell me what it is". So, start running different stains and indicator tests, result was eventually pretty clearly S. Aurius. Except it wasn't. The thing that gave it away was a manitol digestion test, which S. Aurius pops positive for, but the other strain of S. ___ we tested for pop negative.
Everyone's manitol test was positive, but the correct answer should have been S. Epidermidis.
Prof thought the test sample was contaminated, so he did an isolation swab on his own time... still a pure sample of S. Epidermidis, it just evolved under our nose to digest manitol and fucked everyone's lab result.
He had to change everyone's grade. :D
I ain't afraid of old plagues. A 100,000 year old bacterium infecting a human is the equivalent of someone bringing a spear to a gunfight