It's completely dark. Negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit. 50 feet underground.
U.S. Army Soldiers have discovered a clandestine lab where a hostile adversary was working with unknown, and possibly deadly, bacteria. Team members from the 82nd Chemical Reconnaissance Detachment are working with quiet efficiency to determine what the bacteria are, and more importantly, what dangers they pose.
Fortunately, this was not a real scenario, but the premise behind a three-day, multi-agency exercise that took place at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center’s (ERDC) Permafrost Tunnel Research Facility in Fox, Alaska. In addition to the 82nd, representatives from ERDC’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL), Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), U.S. Army Development Command Chemical Biological Center (DEVCOM), U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), 11th Airborne Division Command Surgeon, 103rd Weapons of Mass Destruction-Civil Support Team, and Naval Research Laboratory, among others, conducted the exercise to test Soldiers' ability to quickly and accurately sequence bacteria in extreme cold and arctic conditions.
To do so, the Soldiers used Far-Forward Advanced Sequencing Technology (F-FAST), which was developed by DTRA and U.S. Army DEVCOM to quickly detect, analyze and sequence biological agents while still in the field.
"The idea was that they encounter the lab, and it could be a bioterror lab or a meth lab, there are a lot of possibilities, but regardless they need to quickly characterize what they might be finding," said Gary Larsen, ERDC-CRREL’s tunnel operations manager. "Instead of having to take a sample and then waiting for a week for a lab to run a test and get back to them, they need to batch it up relatively quickly, on site."
While the Soldiers familiarized themselves with F-FAST, other participants were able to share best practices and glean insights as well.
“Both the 11th Airborne Division and 103d WMD-CST shared expedient practices on thawing frozen samples for testing – commercial handwarmers work great for example,” wrote DTRA’s Jeff Lee in an after-action report. “Testing can be performed in the extreme cold, in full CBRN protection gear, and even in total darkness. Medical professionals observed the possible practicality for greater environmental testing of deployed forces for force health protection. Academics in attendance were able to observe means to characterize and then notionally defeat biomanufactured technologies.”
According to the exercise’s after action report prepared by USSOCOM, a number of firsts were accomplished during the experimentation, including “field testing of newly sequenced ancient bacteria cultured from the permafrost, field expedient techniques to thaw frozen samples and reagents, sample preparation to sequencing analysis in the dark, sequencing analysis in the snow, performing decontamination of the sequencing device, and improved sensitive site exploitation in a very cold and austere environment.”
ERDC-CRREL researchers also contributed to the exercise by lending their expertise in working in cold and extreme weather. They gave Soldiers recommendations on layering and clothing type, as well as tips on how to keep equipment functional and reagents thawed.
The tunnel’s ability to change temperatures and vary lighting conditions allowed the exercise organizers to increase the difficulty level over the course of the three days.
“We started off with the lights on and the temperatures at only a few degrees below freezing,” said Larsen. “But as the exercise went on, we kept dimming the lights and lowering the temperature in the tunnel until the soldiers were working in complete darkness using night vision goggles while the tunnel was negative 20 degrees. It really increased the challenges they faced because that kind of work is harder to perform the darker and colder it gets.”
To lend realism to the test, Dr. Robyn Barbato from ERDC-CRREL’s Soil Microbiology Group provided ancient isolate samples from the tunnel dating to the Pleistocene era for the Soldiers to sample, detect and monitor.
“These unique permafrost bacteria that we isolated from the tunnel are not as well understood or characterized,” said Barbato. “So, they were a really good test for the Soldiers to detect.”
Permafrost provides a unique challenge to anyone trying to isolate bacteria. According to Barbato, a gram of soil including permafrost – about the size of a pen cap – has a billion bacterial cells and 1,000 different species.
“It’s really complex,” she said. “It's a living entity.”