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Genetic testing of people who died in Kyrgyzstan eight years before plague reached Europe reveals an ancient strain of the bacterium Yersinia pestis.

The Yersinia pestis strain extracted from the bones of Black Death victims may no longer exist.

The plague-causing bacterium Yersinia pestis (yellow) adheres to spines (purple) on the inside of a flea's digestive tract.

A University of Chicago geneticist studying the genetics of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, may have died from exposure to a weakened strain he worked with in the laboratory. Wayson stain of Yersinia pestisImage: Wikimedia commons, US Center for Disease Control linkurl:Malcolm J. Casadaban;http://molbio.bsd.uchicago.edu/Faculty_and_Research/02_Faculty_by_Graduate_Program/05_Cell_&_Molecular_Biology.php?faculty_id=32 died on September 13. Autopsy results on Friday (September

Yersinia pestis is a Gram-positive bacterium that has wreaked havoc for centuries by causing plague pandemics such as the Black Death. Threats that Y. pestis could be used as a biological warfare agent suggest that it will continue to provide a healthcare challenge in the future. In the October 4 Nature, Parkhill et al. from The Sanger Centre report the complete genome sequence of the Y. pestis strain CO92 (Nature 2001, 413:523-527).The killer genome consists of a 4.65 megabase chromosome and th

On Thursday, the Associated Press reported that mice carrying Yersinia pestis ? the bacteria that cause bubonic plague -- had disappeared from a laboratory at the Public Health Research Institute, part of the campus of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. The university says it does not know what happened to the mice, first discovered missing two weeks ago.According to the AP, health experts reassured that there was ?scant public risk.? That?s not what Robert Brubaker,

A new study points to repercussions of the Medieval pandemic for the health of modern humans.

Plague has earned a place in history books as the Black Death of medieval Europe, and in novels, from Albert Camus' classic The Plague, to the more recent Year of Wonders.1,2 A different medium for telling the tale of the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis is its genome, recently sequenced by researchers at the Sanger Centre, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Royal London School of Medicine and Dentistry, and the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine.3 In addi

In just four years in the mid-fourteenth century, the medieval pandemic of 'Black Death' killed 17-28 million Europeans, or 30-40% of the total population. Further resurgences later in the century eliminated 90% of the households around Montpellier in southern France. It is in this region that Raoult et al. went searching for the causative agent of the Black Death. Although this agent has been presumed to be Yersinia pestis, the pattern of the disease's spread has led others to suggest alternati