MedicalNewsToday: Entire Black Death Genome Sequenced
Date: 5.12.2011
The entire genome of the Black Death, one of the most vicious epidemics in the history of humankind, has been sequenced by scientists from Canada, Germany, and the USA, according to an article published today in Nature. They are calling it the ancestor of all modern plagues, and add that it is the first time anybody has been able to draft a reconstructed genome of any early pathogen.
The authors say they will now be able to follow how the pathogen has evolved and whether and how its virulence changed over time. Their study has laid the foundations to a more profound understanding of infectious diseases today.
In a recently published study, the same team explain how they managed to pull out miniscule degraded DNA fragments of the agent that caused the Black Death, and demonstrated that a certain variant of the Yersinia pestis bacterium was what caused the plague that wiped out 50 million from Europe's population between 1347 and 1351.
Geneticist Hendrik Poinar, from McMaster University, Canada, explained that their next step was to try and "capture" and sequence the whole genome...
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