|
Darrera modificació: 2011-10-16
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Bos, Kirsten I. - Schuenemann, Verena J. - Golding, G. Brian et al., "A draft genome of Yersinia pestis from victims of the Black Death", Nature, (2011).
- Resum
- The article is based on the analysis of plague DNA from London, and concludes, among other things, that Justinian's Plague and the 1348 Black Death were not caused by the same agent, and that the Y. pestis they recovered and sequenced does not differ too substantially from the Y. pestis endemic in parts of the world today.
Here we report a reconstructed ancient genome of Yersinia pestis at 30-fold average coverage from Black Death victims securely dated to episodes of pestilence-associated mortality in London, England, 1348-1350. Genetic architecture and phylogenetic analysis indicate that the ancient organism is ancestral to most extant strains and sits very close to the ancestral node of all Y. pestis commonly associated with human infection. Temporal estimates suggest that the Black Death of 1347-1351 was the main historical event responsible for the introduction and widespread dissemination of the ancestor to all currently circulating Y. pestis strains pathogenic to humans, and further indicates that contemporary Y. pestis epidemics have their origins in the medieval era. Comparisons against modern genomes reveal no unique derived positions in the medieval organism, indicating that the perceived increased virulence of the disease during the Black Death may not have been due to bacterial ph enotype. These findings support the notion that factors other than microbial genetics, such as environment, vector dynamics and host susceptibility, should be at the forefront of epidemiological discussions regarding emerging Y. pestis infections.
- Matèries
- Medicina - Pesta i altres malalties
Arqueologia
- URL
- http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/ ...
|