The Black Death, which killed up to 50% of the European population in less than five years, was the single greatest mortality event in recorded history. New research has discovered evidence that one of the darkest periods in recorded human history placed a substantial selective pressure on the human
population, changing the frequency of certain immune-related genetic variants and affecting our susceptibility to disease today.
“This was a very direct way to evaluate the impact that a single pathogen had on human evolution,” said co-senior author on the study, Luis Barreiro, PhD, Professor of Genetic Medicine at UChicago. “People have speculated for a long time that the Black Death might be a strong cause of selection, but it’s hard to demonstrate that when looking at modern populations, because humans had to face many other selective pressures between then and now.
In the study, the scientists took advantage of recent advances in sequencing technology to examine ancientsamples from the bones of over 200 individuals from London and Denmark who died before, during, and after the Black Death plague swept through the region in the late 1340s.
“Diseases and epidemics like the Black Death leave impacts on our genomes, like archeology projects to detect,” said Hendrik Poinar, PhD, Professor of Anthropology at McMaster University and co-senior author on the study. “This is a first look at how pandemics can modify our genomes but go undetected in modern populations. These genes are under balancing selection — what provided tremendous protection during hundreds of years of plague epidemics has turned out to be autoimmune-related now.
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