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Scientists Sequence Black Death Bacteria
First time accepted submitter Quince alPillan writes "The bacteria behind the Black Death has a very unusual history. Its ancestor is an unassuming soil bacterium and the current strains of Yersinia pestis still infects thousands of people annually, but no longer causes the suite of horrifying symptoms associated with the medieval plagues. The radical differences, in fact, had led some to suggest that we had been blaming the wrong bacteria. Now, researchers have obtained DNA from some of London's plague victims, and confirmed that Y. pestis appears to be to blame. But the sequences also suggest that the strains of bacteria we see today may be different from the ones that rampaged through Europe."
Blackteria
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the Black Death was ugly. Imagine half the population of your entire city or town dying off in 1 or 2 years. Nasty business that.
But, that said, people really should take a more reasoned approach to disease alarmism these days. All this "This latest pandemic is going to kill us ALL!!" Chicken Little shit gets tiresome. The Littles always cite the Black Death and 1918 pandemic as if that's what we could expect from a pandemic today--all without noting the MASSIVE improvements in sanitation, medical science, vaccine research, etc. that make this scale of pandemic highly unlikely in the modern era.
The Black Death could have been stopped in its tracks if those 14th-century peasants had even an inkling of the basic medical/sanitation knowledge that even the biggest idiots among us know today. Basic stuff like "Wash your hands regularly," "Cover your mouth when you cough," and "Don't let your goddamned flea-infested farm animals wander around through your living area, moron" are surprisingly recent bits of common sense that the developed world today takes for granted. Of course, there are still some third-world shitholes where people think that a witch-doctor rubbing feces on an open wound will ward off the evil spirits. But even those places usually have a FEW among them with some basic sense (and soap).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Just as a point of interest, we STILL haven't stopped the Black Death. Sure we know how to treat it and how it spreads to help slow it, but there are still cases in New Mexico every year. And that's the US - Not where the Plague was really partying. It's a tough little bug and probably worth studying even if it isn't the huge threat it once was.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Well, the actual question is: exactly how different. Yes, it's clear that some mutations are inevitable, but unless there's some clear evolutionary pressure, you may still find a bacterium that works by and large just like its ancestors.
Now it may seem that for a parasitic bacterium, not killing its host would be an advantage. And indeed in some other bacteria we can see a sort of a survival-of-the-sickest kind of selection.
But this is a soil bacterium. If it ends up in some host and kills it, worst that can happen is that it ends up back in the soil. It has nothing to lose by killing its host, and in fact everything to gain, since once the host is dead there's no more immune system killing the bacteria.
This kind of bacteria that have nothing to lose by killing the host are the most deadly and dangerous. Not just this, but see for example cholera too. That's a bacterium that not only has nothing to gain by peacefully staying inside you and not killing you, but is actually trying to get out of your body ASAP. Whether you live or die in the process, meh, it makes no difference for that one.
Additionally, for Y Pestis, the capability of clotting blood and forming colonies that plug blood vessels actually helped it spread too. The same mechanism makes it plug the stomach of fleas. The flea then will literally starve to death no matter how much blood it sucks, and driven by hunger, will go infect another host too.
So we have a bacterium for which the plasmid that kills its host:
1. isn't detrimental to the bacterium, since it can live just as well in a dead host or in soil, and
2. is actually beneficial to the bacterium, since it makes fleas spread it around.
That's one tough combo to evolve out of. There is no real survival benefit in losing those genes.
So while, yes, you would expect that bacteria can and will mutate in time, but it's not clear at all why this one would change in exactly that aspect.
Yet something seems to have changed. What and why? Those are the questions.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Venter didn't create life from scratch. His team rebuilt a bacterial genome out of pre-existing parts and threw them into a pre-existing chassis. To provide out an ever-faithful computer analogy, he basically installed Gentoo on some Mycoplasma genitalium. It wasn't that exciting, just more laborious.
Which brings me to the second point: that much DNA synthesis and construct assembly is absurdly expensive. Even to transfer the dangerous parts into another bacterium via a plasmid vector would be unwieldly labourious, mostly because you'd have to figure out what the parts are, first.
Which brings me to the third point: it is infinitely cheaper just to buy more traditional forms of weaponry than to swallow the startup cost for biological warfare. Even to poison an entire town's drinking water with lethal amounts of Brevetoxin would be cheaper. You can basically chill out now.
P.S., Caucasians probably have serious herd immunity against the most famous strains by now and don't even know it. Even if you get the work perfect, its reliability would still be a bad gamble.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Asthma incidence has strong correlation to having parents who smoke. Allergy incidence to those who were not breastfed but consumed formula.
Craig Venter did NOT "create life from scratch", he put a modified Mycoplasma genitalium genome into a mycoplasma. His team "stripped down" the genome to find a minimal set that would support life, then added some "nonsense" like encoded people's names and a web site address. Then they sythesized that sequence and injected it. To put it another way, just because you download a kernel from kernel.org, rip out everything that won't support your particular machine, compile and install it...doesn't make you a Linus who "built his own kernel from scratch".
While there's some truth to that, it is hardly foolproof and the feces thing is actually still true in some cases. Traditional medicine made (and makes) many errors.
"Tetanus of the newborn occurs through contamination of the umbilical stump (and occasionally as a complication of circumcision). Neonatal tetanus is common in some cultures that have practices that encourage infection. Some tribes in the Loralai district of Pakistan practice 'bundling,' in which the lower abdomen of the newborn is smeared with cow dung and then the child is wrapped in a sheepskin blanket. The Masai have a high neontal death rate in part due to the custom of packing the umbilical stump with cow dung."
-- The vaccine controversy: the history, use and safety of vaccinations By Kurt Link. pp71
Goes on to mention some other practices.
This sort of thing isn't unique in traditional medicine, either.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'