Analysis of 3800-year-old Yersinia pestis genomes suggests Bronze Age origin for bubonic plague
Open Access
- 8 June 2018
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Springer Science and Business Media LLC in Nature Communications
- Vol. 9 (1), 1-10
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-04550-9
Abstract
The origin of Yersinia pestis and the early stages of its evolution are fundamental subjects of investigation given its high virulence and mortality that resulted from past pandemics. Although the earliest evidence of Y. pestis infections in humans has been identified in Late Neolithic/Bronze Age Eurasia (LNBA 5000-3500y BP), these strains lack key genetic components required for flea adaptation, thus making their mode of transmission and disease presentation in humans unclear. Here, we reconstruct ancient Y. pestis genomes from individuals associated with the Late Bronze Age period (similar to 3800 BP) in the Samara region of modern-day Russia. We show clear distinctions between our new strains and the LNBA lineage, and suggest that the full ability for flea-mediated transmission causing bubonic plague evolved more than 1000 years earlier than previously suggested. Finally, we propose that several Y. pestis lineages were established during the Bronze Age, some of which persist to the present day.This publication has 80 references indexed in Scilit:
- Integrative Genomics Viewer (IGV): high-performance genomics data visualization and explorationBriefings in Bioinformatics, 2012
- A draft genome of Yersinia pestis from victims of the Black DeathNature, 2011
- A framework for variation discovery and genotyping using next-generation DNA sequencing dataNature Genetics, 2011
- Yersinia pestis genome sequencing identifies patterns of global phylogenetic diversityNature Genetics, 2010
- New approaches to population stratification in genome-wide association studiesNature Reviews Genetics, 2010
- BEDTools: a flexible suite of utilities for comparing genomic featuresBioinformatics, 2010
- Fast and accurate long-read alignment with Burrows–Wheeler transformBioinformatics, 2010
- Patterns of damage in genomic DNA sequences from a NeandertalProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2007
- Principal components analysis corrects for stratification in genome-wide association studiesNature Genetics, 2006
- Genome sequence of Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of plagueNature, 2001