Scientists work to reconstruct plague genome

Efforts to reconstruct the genome of the bacterium that killed nearly half of Europe in the mid-14^th century are nearly complete, according to a team of international researchers.

Reconstruction on more than 99 percent of the genome of the Yersinia pestis strain responsible for the plague that devastated Europe beginning in 1348 and killed at least 100 million people over the next four years in nearly finished.

“A phylogenetic analysis of the reconstructed genome revealed that the plague pathogen is just two substitutions away from the common ancestor of all modern strains of Y. pestis, Johannes Krause, PhD, of the University of Tübingen in Germany, and an international team of colleagues wrote online in Nature,” according to the online publication MedPage Today.

“It’s extremely closely related” to strains circulating today, Krause said on a Tuesday conference call with reporters.

Krause and his colleagues’ work marks the first time a historical pathogen has been reconstructed from skeletal remains – in this case from Black Death victims interred at the East Smithfield mass burial site in London from 1348 to 1350, MedPage Today reported.