Humans have rarely encountered an enemy as devastating as the black death. Between 1347 and 1351 black death sparked, an infection carried by fleas that spread rapidly across Europe killing around 50 million people.
It had struck at a time when the climate was suddenly getting cool. Amidst the war and famine, people were moving into closer quarters where the disease could spread easily, scientists say. And the first time this particular disease had hit humans, it has been suggested that our immune defenses against the germ were lacking.
"It was literally like the four horseman of the apocalypse that rained on Europe," said study author Johannes Krause of Germany's University of Tubingen. "People literally thought it was the end of the world."
But now scientists have sorted out the entire genetic scheme of the original Black Death DNA. It has been said that a specific variant of the Yersinia pestis (Y. pestis) bacterium was responsible for the plague. Also this bacterium is the ancestor for all modern-aged plaques. Experts say the direct descendants of the same bubonic plague still exist today, killing around 2,000 people a year.
For the study ,extracting and analyzing the DNA remains of the black death victims buried in London's East Smithfield "plague pits," which are located under what is now the Royal Mint.
Hence a full sketch of the entire Black Death genome was made which should now allow researchers to track changes in the disease's evolution, and understand why this was so deadly .
Kirsten Bos from McMaster University explained how the process worked.
“If you actually crack open an ancient tooth of black death’s victims you see a dark black powdery material and that’s very likely to be dried up blood and other biological. opening the pulp chamber and with a drill bit made one pass through and came out about 30 milligrams of material, a very very small amount and that’s the material called DNA”
From the dental pulp the researchers were able to purify and analyze the pathogen’s DNA, and exclude material from human and fungal sources.
A Wayson stain of the Yersinia pestis bacterium, responsible for the plague that ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351.
The researchers believe the techniques they have developed in this work can be used to study the genomes of many other ancient pathogens.
Today, simple antibiotics like tetracycline can beat the plague bacterium, which seems to lack the properties that enable other germs to become drug resistant. Plus, advances in medical treatment, along with improved sanitation, put humanity in a better position to tackle plaques.
The evolution of society and medicine and our own bodies has far outpaced the evolution of that deadly bacterium. Plague seems to have reduced in impact over the following centuries because humans evolved resistance.
"Getting an effectively complete genome sequence of a bacterium that lived nearly 700 years ago is incredibly exciting,"
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