McMaster Ancient DNA News

Nature news article on the first complete sequence of Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of the Black Death.

Nature News article on the first plague genome.

Press stories surrounding the McMaster Ancient DNA Centre's recent work on the completion of the Yersinia pestis's (plague genome).

This paper reports the first complete genome of the causitive agent behind the Black Death, Yersinia pestis. Notably it also shows that modern Yersinia pestis strains have stem from these medieval lineages and suggest that factors other than bacterial phenotype may have played a large role in the increased virulance of the Black Death strain.

This work illustrates that antibiotic resistance is a naturally occurring, widespread phenomenon that predates our extensive use of antibiotics. This is consistent with the rapid rise of antibiotic resistance in clinical settings which likely build on establish antibiotic resistance genes in their environments.

The New York Times article on recent work by the McMaster Ancient DNA Centre on the discovery of antibiotic resistance genes in 30,000-year-old Yukon sediment.

The New York Times's article on the work of researchers from the McMaster Ancient DNA Centre and its collaborators on the identification of the microbe responsible for the Black Death.

Here we report the entire full pPCP1 virulence-associated plasmid of Yersinia pestis as high coverage, the longest contingous genomic sequence of an ancient pathogen to date. Further analysis shows that this plasmid belongs to a Y. pestis strain that has not been previously reported and as such is likely not responsible for modern forms of the disease.

Article on recent work by the McMaster Ancient DNA Centre regarding the genetics of Columbian mammoths. The findings suggest that Woolly and Columbian mammoths share very similar mitochondria and may have interbred.