Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Recover Black Death RNA From Exhumed Victims
Richard.Tao writes "Scientists have recovered the RNA of the virus that caused the plague by digging through an English mass grave, and compiling [from several partial examples] the genetics of the virus. Though the plague still persists, scientists have believe the ancient strain was different due to a different onset of symptoms."
I'm not dead yet!
No brain, no pain.
Just in time to start Zombie Apocalypse for Halloween. Seriously, though, I always assumed that the plague was a bacterium and it would be easy to combat it with antibiotics. Ouch, clearly not so. Seems that an outbreak even today could do severe damage.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I'm sure this will end well.
eom
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/08/30/1522206/scientists-sequence-black-death-bacteria
Yersinia pestis is a bacterium, not a virus. The article clearly describes stitching together DNA, not RNA. Important little details...
Burke: "Look, those two specimens are worth millions to the bioweapons division. Now, if you're smart, we can both come out of it as heroes and we'll be set up for life."
Ripley: "You're crazy Burke, you know that? You really think that you can get a dangerous organism like that past ICC quarantine?"
Burke: "How can they impound it if they don't know about it?"
Dear Editors,
A NY Times link that looks like this will always take you to a login page:
http://www.nytimes.com/glogin?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/science/13plague.html
A NY Times link that looks like this should not take you to a login page:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/science/13plague.html
Please consider editing the summaries accordingly.
Most Respectfully,
Tubesteak
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
TFA here
#include bier;
I read once where this (reduced potency over time) is typical.
When an infectious agent jumps species, it's typically extremely virile and will easily kill the host. This puts selection pressure on the agent to be less fatal, so that the agent has more time to spread among the available hosts.
For example, the flu killed 20% of those infected in 1918, but today it's mostly an annoyance.
Probably the same thing here. A mutation results in a particularly virulent strain, which lessens in potency over time.
http://www.thespec.com/news/local/article/608093--mac-researchers-unlock-secrets-of-black-death
This was in the paper a couple days ago.
It was a bacteria not virus that caused it...
It isn't what you have, it's what you don't have--resistance.
Perhaps the recovered virus DNA researchers are looking at is similar to the modern Yersinia pestis because it is the same critter--just somewhat removed in ancestry. It doesn't take many changes in our own biological functions to acquire a resistance to Yersinia pestis. That alone can explain the difference in symptoms between the Black Plague victims and victims of the virus today. There is good evidence that such a thing occurs. Syphilis is a good example.
Syphilis existed in the Old World, before contact with the Americas, but only in a relatively mild form--it was more of a skin condition then anything else. It wasn't until European contact with the area now know as The Guianas, in South America, that the Old World was re-exposed to syphilis--only this time it was a long-lost cousin of syphilis that had changed over the course of time, the time it took for humanity to spread around the globe and carry it into the New World. Europeans had not developed a resistance to this long-lost cousin and suffered horribly. The symptoms were very different from the syphilis they were used to back home--bone deformities that crushed organs and brains and swiftly killed the host. Killing the host is not always a good evolutionary tactic for long-term survival of a species. Not long after this cousin virus was "brought home", Europeans began to develop resistances to this cousin eventually leading to what we have today--a sexually-transmitted disease that rarely kills it's host, and based on past symptoms, is relatively benign. Jared Diamond wrote extensively on the subject.
There is the distinct possibility that it was not merely a matter of us developing a resistance, but rather the syphilis evolving is such a way as to not kill it's host and thereby increase the chance for survival. Maybe that is all that has happened with Yersinia pestis--it stopped killing it's meal-ticket. A trillion trillion syphilis virii can't ALL be wrong.
All of that being said, I think the researchers are trying to find the specific changes in genes that changed the symptoms of the virus--if they can determine that, they can then take that knowledge and attempt to force such changes in other modern virii and possibly lessen, or end altogether, the symptoms of said virii. It is a little like taking two images of a piece of the night sky, a month apart, and looking for what changed--the changes are more apparent when scaled differently in terms of time. These guys are literally digging up past "images" of Yersinia pestis.
The Black Plauge was caused by bacteria. Why does the modern variety of it vary in genetic structure, you ask? It's called evolution.
The main discovery according to Abbie Smith http://scienceblogs.com/erv/2011/10/black_death_not_initiated_by_a.php is what DNA this did not contain. There was some speculation that there might be some plasmid (a small circular strand of DNA which bacteria can share with each other or sometimes pick up from the environment) that was making the plague more deadly. This result shows that that wasn't the case. The Black Plague was deadly due to lack of antibiotics, lack of sanitation, and lack of resistance. This means we don't need to be that worried about some sort of super-strain of plague coming back to bite us. It also helps underscore how much basic hygiene and sanitation help in reducing disease.
We need to keep in mind the life in the world around us. It's ok to do whatever we will, so long as we keep captive preservation alive in well. I commend these scientists, in all the world's history can anyone think of a more deserving lifeform to preserve than the black plague? Also, can we feed it hippies?
This could be very interesting for HIV. There seems to be a genetic link between HIV resistance and the plague. A study of the Black Death's DNA from way back could perhaps shed more light on this phenomenon and how we can use it for potential gene therapy. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/050325234239.htm http://qjmed.oxfordjournals.org/content/99/8/497.full
I write professional videogame reviews! http://www.digitallydownloaded.net/
"researchers hope to recreate the microbe itself so as to understand what made the Black Death outbreak so deadly"
afterall, what could go wrong?
I have never been comfortable with this sort of thing. It may be that I've seen too many movies.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
"Scientists have recovered the RNA of the virus that caused the plague by digging through an English mass grave, and compiling [from several partial examples] the genetics of the virus. Though the plague still persists, scientists have believe the ancient strain was different due to a different onset of symptoms."
You want to correct that, it is a bacteria and not a virus (you can find this in the very article you mention).
Anyone who survived the black death and passed on their genes to modern humans was obviously not in the most vulnerable group. The most vulnerable group died off when this occurred. So gee, I wonder why it's not as terrible today?
It's like spraying pesticides; after a while you breed pesticide-resistant pests.
While the poster cites a very interesting article, the original posting contains two glaring errors. Specifically, the paper describes sequencing the genomic and plasmid DNA of the a specific strain of the species Yersinia pestis (a reasonably close relative of the 'dreaded' E. coli, BTW). So, no RNA! Not a Virus! The Nature paper, itself, uses currently conventional methods and draws very plausible conclusions based on our knowledge of Enterobacterial evolution. A review of the Yersinia literature shows that there is believed to be an association between various historical plague outbreaks and the certain characteristic changes in DNA sequence. It is not clear, however, that any of these genetic markers reflect changes in virulence. Finally, we don't have to recover plague from old graves to get virulent strains Y. pestis, since they are still thriving in certain parts of the world to day. For example in the four corners region of the USA. I've taken a look at Abbie Smith's blog and sense some confusion leading to the conclusions that she draws. For sure, we know that some of the plasmids contain virulence factors relate to the disease. It is a demonstrable fact. The nature paper just reports that there was difficulty isolating and sequencing pPCP1 to a reasonable level of coverage.
I'm not dead yet!
This was a triumph.
I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS.
It's hard to overstate my satisfaction.
Aperture Science
We do what we must
because we can.
For the good of all of us.
Except the ones who are dead.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Slashdot: yesterday's news, today!