On Oct. 13, 2011, an international team, led by researchers at McMaster University and the University of Tubingen in Germany, announced the they had sequenced the entire genome of the Black Death, one of the most devastating epidemics in human history.

This marks the first time scientists have been able to draft a reconstructed genome of any ancient pathogen, which will allow researchers to track changes in the pathogen’s evolution and virulence over time. This work — currently published online in the scientific journal Nature — could lead to a better understanding of modern infectious diseases.

Geneticists Hendrik Poinar and Kirsten Bos of McMaster University and Johannes Krause and Verena Schuenemann of the University of Tubingen collaborated with Brian Golding and David Earn of McMaster University, Hernán A. Burbano and Matthias Meyer of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Sharon DeWitte of the University of South Carolina, among others.

In a separate study published recently, the team described a novel methodological approach to pull out tiny degraded DNA fragments of the causative agent of the Black Death, and showed that a specific variant of the Yersinia pestis bacterium, was responsible for the plague that killed 50 million Europeans between 1347 and 1351.

Major technical advances in DNA recovery and sequencing have dramatically expanded the scope of genetic analysis of ancient specimens, opening new horizons in the understanding of emerging and re-emerging infections.