Publicaties

Yersinia pestis, the etiological agent of the plague, is considered a genetically homogeneous species. Brazil is currently in a period of epidemiological silence but plague antibodies are still detected in sentinel animals, suggesting disease activity in the sylvatic cycle. The present study deployed an in silico approach to analyze virulence factors among 407 Brazilian genomes of Y. pestis belonging to the Fiocruz Collection (1966–1997). The ...

Little is known about the presence/absence and prevalence of Rickettsia spp, Bartonella spp. and Yersinia pestis in domestic and urban flea populations in tropical and subtropical African countries. Methodology/Principal findings: Fleas collected in Benin, the United Republic of Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of the Congo were investigated for the presence and identity of Rickettsia spp., Bartonella spp. and Yersinia pestis using two qPCR ...

The first historically documented pandemic caused by Yersinia pestis began as the Justinianic Plague in 541 within the Roman Empire and continued as the so-called First Pandemic until 750. Although paleogenomic studies have previously identified the causative agent as Y. pestis, little is known about the bacterium's spread, diversity, and genetic history over the course of the pandemic. To elucidate the microevolution of the bacterium during ...

The second plague pandemic, caused by Yersinia pestis, devastated Europe and the nearby regions between the 14th and 18th centuries AD. Here we analyse human remains from ten European archaeological sites spanning this period and reconstruct 34 ancient Y. pestis genomes. Our data support an initial entry of the bacterium through eastern Europe, the absence of genetic diversity during the Black Death, and low within-outbreak diversity ...

The complex topologies of large multi-domain globular proteins make the study of their folding and assembly particularly demanding. It is often characterized by complex kinetics and undesired side reactions, such as aggregation. The structural simplicity of tandem-repeat proteins, which are characterized by the repetition of a basic structural motif and are stabilized exclusively by sequentially localized contacts, has provided opportunities for ...

The genus Yersinia is a large and diverse bacterial genus consisting of human-pathogenic species, a fish-pathogenic species, and a large number of environmental species. Recently, the phylogenetic and population structure of the entire genus was elucidated through the genome sequence data of 241 strains encompassing every known species in the genus. Here we report the mining of this enormous data set to create a multilocus sequence typing-based ...

The genus Ctenophthalmus Kolenati, 1856 (Siphonaptera: Ctenophthalmidae) in the Afrotropical region. Description of a new taxon; distribution and specificity of the subgenera Ethioctenophthalmus, Geoctenophthalmus and Idioctenophthalmus. As vectors of the plague bacillus (Yersinia pestis) and other neglected agents (Rickettsia, Bartonella) fleas of small mammals should, in endemic areas, be inventoried, their distribution documented, and their ...

A core concept of infectious disease epidemiology is the abundance threshold, below which an infection is unable to invade or persist. There have been contrasting theoretical predictions regarding the nature of this threshold for vector-borne diseases, but for infections with an invertebrate vector, it is common to assume a threshold defined by the ratio of vector and host abundances. Here, we show in contrast, both from field data and model ...

Background Human cases of plague (Yersinia pestis) infection originate, ultimately, in the bacterium's wildlife host populations. The epidemiological dynamics of the wildlife reservoir therefore determine the abundance, distribution and evolution of the pathogen, which in turn shape the frequency, distribution and virulence of human cases. Earlier studies have shown clear evidence of climatic forcing on contemporary plague abundance in rodents ...