Climate change and materials virology
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MATERIAL MATTERS
Climate change and materials virology By Ahmad R. Kirmani
C
hanges in the climate during the past century are likely due to human activities. And it has not taken long for these changes to show dangerous repercussions across the planet. Writers for newspapers, science journals, and magazines and experts in the field have voiced warnings about the catastrophic effects on the Earth because of our overreliance on nonrenewable energy. Increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, rising ocean temperatures, alarming sea levels worldwide, melting polar caps, and the shrinking Antarctica are only some of the signs that should convince even the harshest of skeptics that climate change is real and has arrived.1,2 More troubling is the strengthening evidence that it may not be possible to undo the negative effects of climate change caused by humans: We may have reached the tipping point. Some recent reports suggest that existing climate change models might have been underestimating the extent of environmental damage caused to the planet.3,4 One alarming example is the fastmelting Siberian permafrost. A consequence is that as the ice melts, dangerous, giant viruses, snoozing underneath thick
sheets of polar ice for millions of years, are crawling back to life.5 Some of these might have caused global epidemics in the past, although they have not interacted with life forms on Earth since they were frozen in the tundra. Troublesome, indeed, is the realization that we do not yet have any antibiotics available to thwart these microbes. The history of these viruses is still being researched and is not completely understood. Some of these viruses have been discovered recently in Siberian surveys, and these specimens are very different (in terms of genome size, etc.) from the viruses we commonly deal with and have the vaccines to thwart the effects of today. It might be a matter of time until never-before-heard-of diseases begin to sweep across the globe, as these malicious viruses thaw. Materials science stands to play an important role in stalling the current climatic plunge as it liaises strongly with the science and understanding of our environment. Materials and biological sciences have worked in tandem, leading to various scientific breakthroughs. Soft matter, such as biomaterials, are becoming more important in materials science, with a recent milestone being the advent of DNA nanotechnology. In the context of viruses, initial forays into the structural understanding of viruses and life forms at the submicron scale were made possible by employing the materials characterization tool chest, such as x-ray diffractometers and electron microscopes.6 Cryo-electron microscopy was specifically developed for the structural determination of biomolecules, such as HIV,7 leading to a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2017. An interesting direction for the near future in this arena is materials virology. Studying the structure–property
relationships of viral assemblies in ultracold conditions by employing
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