Frozen Zoo: a collection of permafrost samples containing viable protists and their viruses

Stas Malavin (1) , Lyubov Shmakova (1) , Jean-Michel Claverie (2) , Elizaveta Rivkina (1)

1 Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science
2 IGS - Information génomique et structurale

Permafrost, frozen ground cemented with ice, occupies about a quarter of the Earth’s hard surface and reaches up to 1000 metres depth. Due to constant subzero temperatures, permafrost represents a unique record of past epochs, whenever it comes to accumulated methane, oxygen isotope ratio or stored mummies of animals. Permafrost is also a unique environment where cryptobiotic stages of different microorganisms are trapped and stored alive for up to hundreds of thousands of years. Several protist strains and two giant protist viruses isolated from permafrost cores have been already described

Keywords: Permafrost; microbiology collection; protists; giant viruses

Domains: Virology

Stas Malavin, Lyubov Shmakova, Jean-Michel Claverie, Elizaveta Rivkina. Frozen Zoo: a collection of permafrost samples containing viable protists and their viruses. Biodiversity Data Journal, 2020, 8, ⟨10.3897/BDJ.8.e51586⟩. ⟨hal-02899363⟩