Some people check an ice cube for oddities before dropping it into their glass.
It’s a long shot that a bug was frozen inside, or that black mold from the freezer’s ice machine had caught on the cube as it solidified, but they check anyway – just for safety’s sake.
Now in a lab on the fifth floor of the University’s Life Sciences Building, Scott Rogers, chair of the biological sciences department, is checking ice dating back more than two million years – for everyone’s safety’s sake.
With countries in Asia and Europe fearful of how an avian bird flu may mutate and begin affecting humans, and cries of global warming coming from every direction, Rogers’ research into what lies dormant inside glacial ice is more important than ever.
And to think, Rogers got into researching organisms trapped in time through pee-covered seeds.
As a graduate student at the University of Oregon, Rogers began researching the preserved seeds that packrats had collected more than 100,000 years ago.
After collecting seeds, a packrat would urinate all over them – forming a crystallized shell that drew moisture out of the seeds and preserved them for meals down the road.
Rogers was able to extract DNA from the 100,000-year-old seeds due in large part to the packrats unique preservation method, and he began to wonder how other things could be preserved over long periods of time.
And he took this curiosity to the next level in 1995, Rogers began working with scientists at Syracuse on how yeasts may or may not have been able to survive in ancient ice.
“I didn’t plan on working on ice,” Rogers said, “but you start working on things, and in time I’ve come to this point.”
Now studying at MIT, Li-Jun Ma still shivers with excitement when remembering her work as Rogers’ first graduate assistant on the ice project at Syracuse in 1999-2000.
At that time everyone was still unsure of the project’s potential, Ma said, though each small success kept them motivated.
“It was quite interesting,” Ma said, “because when you make the hypothesis – that in extreme conditions organisms can be trapped in suspended animation – and look into the research, it showed the hypothesis to be more and more reasonable, which is very exciting.”
Now Rogers and his team of graduate assistants at the University bring in ice cores – or small pieces of ice removed from glaciers – from the National Ice Core Conservatory in Denver, Colo., and slowly melt down the ice to see if anything has been trapped inside.
Research by Rogers and others around the country has shown that DNA preserved in ice, salt and amber can survive much longer – sometimes for millions of years – while other preservation methods like mummification and dehydration are weaker in preservation strength.
Core samples from Greenland, Antarctica and a variety of other frosty places on earth have been examined by Rogers since he started this work in 1995.
Within the ice he’s looking for viruses, bacteria or small organisms that have braved subzero temperatures for millions of years – well before Homo Sapiens took earth’s center stage.
And now with fear of a bird flu mutation in Asia and Europe, scientific research suggests that flu pandemics – like the 1918 Spanish flu that killed 20-40 million people – can be linked to avian flu that mutated enough to directly affect humans.
As microbes or viruses are released from melting glaciers they can be swept through the water cycle and encounter newer viruses. That’s when they have the chance to reconstitute – or borrow choice genes from one another – which is what’s thought to have occurred with the 1918 flu pandemic, according to Rogers.
But should people panic right now over the possibility of an ancient virus escaping its icy prison and being swept into our water cycle? It may just be too early to tell, Rogers said.
“My feeling is that it has been going on for millions of years, so it’s not that new,” he said.
These pandemics around the world seem to cycle every 60 years or so, with a deadly virus’ sequence nearly identical to one that struck 60 years before. Research can show ties between pandemics in 1889 and 1957, 1900 and 1968 and 1918 and 1977.
This dormancy and resurgence of a virus 60 years later adds weight to the argument that they can lie dormant in ice for lengthy periods of time and later reemerge, Rogers said.
Though only 1 percent of organisms they find in the ice usually grow, some microbes that Rogers and his team free from the millennia-old ice cores are very much alive – and begin growing when placed in a petri dish.
It’s this part of the research – going face to face with tiny time-tested organisms that stretch their legs once released from the ice – that excites Tom D’Elia, a graduate assistant who focuses on bacteria and fungi for Rogers’ research.
“You’re unlocking this time-capsule of life history of bacteria and fungi,” D’Elia said. “There could be potential pathogens; [we’re] understanding how these things have been able to adapt and survive.”