MicrobeWorld

A multi-national team of academic, government and industry scientists from Europe, China and the United States published data reconstructing the global evolutional history of devastating plague pandemics in unprecedented detail. This includes the notorious Black Death epidemic in medieval Europe that greatly affected the peoples and governments of Western Civilization. Published today in the prestigious international journal Nature Genetics (published online on 10/31/2010), the research reconstructs the fatal global impact of the plague bacterium (Yersinia pestis), using the historic and phylogenetic comparison of 17 Yersinia pestis isolates from global sources.