Yersinia pestis DNA sequences in late medieval skeletal finds, Bavaria.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Tran TN
PROVIDER: S-EPMC3338162 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description: Not available
| S-EPMC3294523 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Pathogens and associated outbreaks of infectious disease exert selective pressure on human populations, and any changes in allele frequencies that result may be especially evident for genes involved in immunity. In this regard, the 1346-1353 Yersinia pestis-caused Black Death pandemic, with continued plague outbreaks spanning several hundred years, is one of the most devastating recorded in human history. To investigate the potential impact of Y. pestis on human immunity genes, we extracted DNA from 36 plague victims buried in a mass grave in Ellwangen, Germany in the 16th century. We targeted 488 immune-related genes, including HLA, using a novel in-solution hybridization capture approach. In comparison with 50 modern native inhabitants of Ellwangen, we find differences in allele frequencies for variants of the innate immunity proteins Ficolin-2 and NLRP14 at sites involved in determining specificity. We also observed that HLA-DRB1*13 is more than twice as frequent in the modern population, whereas HLA-B alleles encoding an isoleucine at position 80 (I-80+), HLA C*06:02 and HLA-DPB1 alleles encoding histidine at position 9 are half as frequent in the modern population. Simulations show that natural selection has likely driven these allele frequency changes. Thus, our data suggest that allele frequencies of HLA genes involved in innate and adaptive immunity responsible for extracellular and intracellular responses to pathogenic bacteria, such as Y. pestis, could have been affected by the historical epidemics that occurred in Europe.
| S-EPMC8476174 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Medieval Black Death is believed to have killed up to one-third of the Western European population during the 14th century. It was identified as plague at this time, but recently the causative organism was debated because no definitive evidence has been obtained to confirm the role of Yersinia pestis as the agent of plague. We obtained the teeth of a child and two adults from a 14th century grave in France, disrupted them to obtain the pulp, and applied the new "suicide PCR" protocol in which the primers are used only once. There were no positive controls: Neither Yersinia nor Yersinia DNA were introduced in the laboratory. A negative result is followed by a new test using other primers; a positive result is followed by sequencing. The second and third primer pair used, coding for a part of the pla gene, generated amplicons whose sequence confirmed that it was Y. pestis in 1 tooth from the child and 19/19 teeth from the adults. Negative controls were negative. Attempts to detect the putative alternative etiologic agents Bacillus anthracis and Rickettsia prowazekii failed. Suicide PCR avoids any risk of contamination as it uses a single-shot primer-its specificity is absolute. We believe that we can end the controversy: Medieval Black Death was plague.
| S-EPMC18844 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Yersinia pestis, the etiologic agent of the disease plague, has been implicated in three historical pandemics. These include the third pandemic of the 19(th) and 20(th) centuries, during which plague was spread around the world, and the second pandemic of the 14(th)-17(th) centuries, which included the infamous epidemic known as the Black Death. Previous studies have confirmed that Y. pestis caused these two more recent pandemics. However, a highly spirited debate still continues as to whether Y. pestis caused the so-called Justinianic Plague of the 6(th)-8(th) centuries AD. By analyzing ancient DNA in two independent ancient DNA laboratories, we confirmed unambiguously the presence of Y. pestis DNA in human skeletal remains from an Early Medieval cemetery. In addition, we narrowed the phylogenetic position of the responsible strain down to major branch 0 on the Y. pestis phylogeny, specifically between nodes N03 and N05. Our findings confirm that Y. pestis was responsible for the Justinianic Plague, which should end the controversy regarding the etiology of this pandemic. The first genotype of a Y. pestis strain that caused the Late Antique plague provides important information about the history of the plague bacillus and suggests that the first pandemic also originated in Asia, similar to the other two plague pandemics.
| S-EPMC3642051 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of plague, is a deadly bacterium that affects humans. Strain D106004 was isolated from a new plague focus in Yulong County, China, in 2006. To gain insights into the epidemic origin, we have sequenced the genomes of D106004 and strains Z176003 and D182038, isolated from neighboring regions.
| S-EPMC2897648 | biostudies-literature
Project description: Not available
| S-EPMC3320496 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Over the last few years, genomic studies on Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of all known plague epidemics, have considerably increased in numbers, spanning a period of about 5,000 y. Nonetheless, questions concerning historical reservoirs and routes of transmission remain open. Here, we present and describe five genomes from the second half of the 14th century and reconstruct the evolutionary history of Y. pestis by reanalyzing previously published genomes and by building a comprehensive phylogeny focused on strains attributed to the Second Plague Pandemic (14th to 18th century). Corroborated by historical and ecological evidence, the presented phylogeny, which includes our Y. pestis genomes, could support the hypothesis of an entry of plague into Western European ports through distinct waves of introduction during the Medieval Period, possibly by means of fur trade routes, as well as the recirculation of plague within the human population via trade routes and human movement.
| S-EPMC6294933 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Suppression subtractive hybridization, a cost-effective approach for targeting unique DNA, was used to identify a 41.7-kb Yersinia pestis-specific region. One primer pair designed from this region amplified PCR products from natural isolates of Y. pestis and produced no false positives for near neighbors, an important criterion for unambiguous bacterial identification.
| S-EPMC93087 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of plague, diverged from Yersinia pseudotuberculosis, an enteric pathogen, an estimated 1500-20,000 years ago. Genetic characterization of these closely related organisms represents a useful model to study the rapid emergence of bacterial pathogens that threaten mankind. To this end, we undertook genome-wide DNA microarray analysis of 22 strains of Y. pestis and 10 strains of Y. pseudotuberculosis of diverse origin. Eleven Y. pestis DNA loci were deemed absent or highly divergent in all strains of Y. pseudotuberculosis. Four were regions of phage origin, whereas the other seven included genes encoding a vitamin B12 receptor and the insect toxin sepC. Sixteen differences were identified between Y. pestis strains, with biovar Antiqua and Mediaevalis strains showing most divergence from the arrayed CO92 Orientalis strain. Fifty-eight Y. pestis regions were specific to a limited number of Y. pseudotuberculosis strains, including the high pathogenicity island, three putative autotransporters, and several possible insecticidal toxins and hemolysins. The O-antigen gene cluster and one of two possible flagellar operons had high levels of divergence between Y. pseudotuberculosis strains. This study reports chromosomal differences between species, biovars, serotypes, and strains of Y. pestis and Y. pseudotuberculosis that may relate to the evolution of these species in their respective niches.
| S-EPMC403674 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BACKGROUND: Whole genome sequencing allowed the development of a number of high resolution sequence based typing tools for Yersinia (Y.) pestis. The application of these methods on isolates from most known foci worldwide and in particular from China and the Former Soviet Union has dramatically improved our understanding of the population structure of this species. In the current view, Y. pestis including the non or moderate human pathogen Y. pestis subspecies microtus emerged from Yersinia pseudotuberculosis about 2,600 to 28,600 years ago in central Asia. The majority of central Asia natural foci have been investigated. However these investigations included only few strains from Mongolia. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Prokaryotic Repeats (CRISPR) analysis and Multiple-locus variable number of tandem repeats (VNTR) analysis (MLVA) with 25 loci was performed on 100 Y. pestis strains, isolated from 37 sampling areas in Mongolia. The resulting data were compared with previously published data from more than 500 plague strains, 130 of which had also been previously genotyped by single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) analysis. The comparison revealed six main clusters including the three microtus biovars Ulegeica, Altaica, and Xilingolensis. The largest cluster comprises 78 isolates, with unique and new genotypes seen so far in Mongolia only. Typing of selected isolates by key SNPs was used to robustly assign the corresponding clusters to previously defined SNP branches. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: We show that Mongolia hosts the most recent microtus clade (Ulegeica). Interestingly no representatives of the ancestral Y. pestis subspecies pestis nodes previously identified in North-western China were identified in this study. This observation suggests that the subsequent evolution steps within Y. pestis pestis did not occur in Mongolia. Rather, Mongolia was most likely re-colonized by more recent clades coming back from China contemporary of the black death pandemic, or more recently in the past 600 years.
| S-EPMC3281858 | biostudies-literature