Viral spillover risk increases with climate change in High Arctic lake sediments

Abstract

While many viruses have a single natural host, host restriction can be incomplete, hereby leading to spillovers to other host species, potentially causing significant diseases as it is the case with the Influenza A, Ebola, or the SARS-CoV-2 viruses. However, such spillover risks are difficult to quantify. As climate change is rapidly transforming environments, it is becoming critical to quantify the potential for spillovers, in an unbiased manner. For this, we resorted to a metagenomics approach, and focused on two environments in the High Arctic, soil and lake sediments from Lake Hazen. We used DNA and RNA sequencing to reconstruct the lake's virosphere and its range of eukaryotic hosts, and show that spillover risk is higher in lake sediments than in soil and increased with runoff from glacier melt - a proxy for climate change. Should climate change also shift species range of potential vectors northwards, the High Arctic could become fertile ground for emerging pandemics.