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Darrera modificació: 2020-06-22
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Keller, Marcel - Spyrou, Maria A. - Scheib, Christiana L. - Kröpelin, Andreas - Haas-Gebhard, Brigitte - Päffgen, Bernd - Haberstroh, Jochen - Ribera i Lacomba, Albert - Raynaud, Claude - Cessford, Craig - Stadler, Peter - Nägele, Kathrin - Neumann, Gunna, "Ancient Yersinia pestis genomes from across Western Europe reveal early diversification during the First Pandemic (541-750)", PNAS, first published June 4 (2019), (pub. electrónica).
- Resum
- The first historically documented pandemic caused by Yersinia pestis started as the Justinianic Plague in 541 within the Roman Empire and continued as the so-called First Pandemic until 750. Although palaeogenomic studies have previously identified the causative agent as Y. pestis, little is known about the bacterium's spread, diversity and genetic history over the course of the pandemic. To elucidate the microevolution of the bacterium during this time period, we screened human remains from 20 sites in Austria, Britain, Germany, France and Spain for Y. pestis DNA and reconstructed six new genomes. We present a novel methodological approach assessing SNPs in ancient bacterial genomes, facilitating qualitative analyses of low coverage genomes from a metagenomic background. Phylogenetic analysis reveals the existence of previously undocumented Y. pestis diversity during the 6th-7th centuries, and provides evidence for the presence of multiple distinct Y. pestis strains in Europe. We offer genetic evidence for the presence of the Justinianic Plague in the British Isles, previously only hypothesized from ambiguous documentary accounts, as well as southern France and Spain, and that southern Germany seems to have been affected by at least two distinct Y. pestis strains. Four of the reported strains form a polytomy similar to others seen across the Y. pestis phylogeny, associated with the Second and Third Pandemics. We identified a deletion of a 45 kb genomic region in the most recent First Pandemic strain affecting two virulence factors, intriguingly overlapping with a deletion found in 17th-18th-century genomes of the Second Pandemic.
- Matèries
- Medicina - Pesta i altres malalties
- Notes
- This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed.
- URL
- https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/06/03/18204 ...
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