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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.
Way to go Slashdot! Stick with computers
The scientists isolated the DNA (not RNA) of the Bacterium (not virus) that caused the "Black Death" (the Plague).
That's like saying Ford recently upgraded their turboprop so it can run on liquid nitrogen.
Arrrgh!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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!
No, what is interesting, according to TFA is that
The bacterium that causes plague, Yersinia pestis, is still highly virulent today but has different symptoms, leading some historians to doubt that it was the agent of the Black Death.
Those doubts were laid to rest last year by detection of the bacterium’s DNA in plague victims from mass graves across Europe. With the full genome now in hand, the researchers hope to recreate the microbe itself so as to understand what made the Black Death outbreak so deadly.
So far, the evidence points more toward the conditions of the time than to properties of the bacterium itself. The genome recovered from the East Smithfield victims is remarkably similar to that of the present-day bacterium, says the research team, led by Kirsten I. Bos of McMaster University in Ontario and Johannes Krause of the University of Tübingen in Germany.
So the bug is pretty much the same genetically and presumably biologically. What is likely different is the host. At the time of the Black Death there was widespread famine. It is certainly plausible that Y. pestis is much more pathologic in a weak, starving host living in awful non hygienic circumstances. This is a testable hypothesis but hopefully no one is ever going to do that experiment.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Also, viruses can be DNA or RNA.
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 number of doomsayers will always be greater than zero, and sometimes you won't even have to go past first post.
For a "news for nerds" site, we sure seem to have a lot of technophobes.
Technophobes will be the doom of us all!!!!
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
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.