Black Death Mysteries
by Mechas — A new explanation for the spread of the plague-causing Yersinia pestis.
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TWiM 285: How plague got deadly
TWiM reveals a new type of satellite virus that requires only phage tails for producing infectious virus particles, and that highly virulent plague bacteria differs from its innocuous enteric predecessor by its resistance to lysis by human complement.
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On the Source of the Black Death
by Roberto — Yersinia pestis. How immediate our reaction can be to the species name of this bacterium, making us conjure up images of pestilence. As its discoverer, Alexander Yersin, wrote in 1894 of an outbreak of bubonic plague in Hong Kong, this is the "bacille de la peste." (Working independently, Kitasato Shibasaburo also characterized the plague bacterium at nearly the exact same time.)
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Live at ASM Biodefense 2016 — TWiM #121
This Week in Microbiology (TWiM) host, Vincent Racaniello, sits down with Rebekah Kading and Wyndham Lathem at the ASM Biodefense and Emerging Diseases Research meeting to have a conversation about their work on Rift Valley Fever virus and other vector-borne pathogens, and the evolution and pathogenesis of Yersinia pestis, the agent of plague.
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TWiM #80: Hurling Fleas and Designer Chromosomes
Vincent, Elio, and Michele discuss how to synthesize a designer yeast chromosome, and deciphering the genetic changes path that allowed Yersinia pestis to be transmitted by fleas.
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A Pestis from the Past
by S. Marvin Friedman — In recent decades we've come to realize that victory goes not to the swift or to the strong, but to the immune. The introduction of agents of deadly diseases into immunologically naïve populations determined momentous events in human history. The conquest of the Americas resulted in good part from the…
