ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2013
Historical variations in mutation rate in an epidemic pathogen, Yersinia pestis.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 184 papers.
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184 citing papers in PubMed, 403 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Epidemiological and Epizootological Monitoring and Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Plague in Natural Foci of Kazakhstan.Pathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
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- Insights into infectious diseases through ancient pathogen genomics.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2026Review
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- Wave succession in the pandemic clone of Vibrio parahaemolyticus driven by gene loss.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Retracing the path of evolution: polymorphisms ofEmerging microbes & infections · 2025Article
- Molecular Tracing and Comparative Genomics Analysis ofPathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Evaluating the early diversification of Yersinia pestis and its phylogeographic expansion over 96 years of evolution in Madagascar.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Plagued by the Past, Pressed by the Present: A One Health Perspective onBiomedicines · 2025Review
- Ancient Origins and Global Diversity of Plague: Genomic Evidence for Deep Eurasian Reservoirs and Recurrent Emergence.Pathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Insights into Yersinia pestis evolution through rearrangement analysis of 242 complete genomes.Nature genetics · 2025Article
- New mini-satellite tandem repeat markers for strain typing of Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis.Molecular biology reports · 2025Article
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- Insights into Treponema pallidum genomics from modern and ancient genomes using a novel mapping strategy.BMC biology · 2025Article
- Elucidation of peptide screen for targeted identification of Yersinia pestis by nano-liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Hotspots of genetic change in Yersinia pestis.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Decoding and Unravelling Mpox, Herpes, and Syphilis Infections: A State of Art Review.Current pharmaceutical biotechnology · 2025Review
124 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
33 authors at 11 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
Abstract
The genetic diversity of Yersinia pestis, the etiologic agent of plague, is extremely limited because of its recent origin coupled with a slow clock rate. Here we identified 2,326 SNPs from 133 genomes of Y. pestis strains that were isolated in China and elsewhere. These SNPs define the genealogy of Y. pestis since its most recent common ancestor. All but 28 of these SNPs represented mutations that happened only once within the genealogy, and they were distributed essentially at random among individual genes. Only seven genes contained a significant excess of nonsynonymous SNP, suggesting that the fixation of SNPs mainly arises via neutral processes, such as genetic drift, rather than Darwinian selection. However, the rate of fixation varies dramatically over the genealogy: the number of SNPs accumulated by different lineages was highly variable and the genealogy contains multiple polytomies, one of which resulted in four branches near the time of the Black Death. We suggest that demographic changes can affect the speed of evolution in epidemic pathogens even in the absence of natural selection, and hypothesize that neutral SNPs are fixed rapidly during intermittent epidemics and outbreaks.
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