Our European ancestors’ immunity to infection may come with a cost. A new study of remains from the Black Death illustrates this trade-off. crohns
, bubonic plague once killed 60 percent of those infected . In the ancient world, it caused successive waves of misery, the most devastating of which was the Black Death, often dated from 1346 to 1350, an episode thought to have wiped out at least 25 million people — about a third or more of the European population. have shaped the evolution of the human immune system. Studies are teasing out the ways the massive winnowing of the plague altered Europeans’ immune-related genetics.
In this most recent study, population geneticist Luis Barreiro of the University of Chicago and colleagues collected samples containing DNA from the remains of 516 people in London and Denmark who died between 1000 and 1800, including those buried during the Black Death. The researchers examined stretches of DNA for immune-related genes and areas associated with autoimmune and inflammatory diseases.
Researchers collected DNA samples from burial sites in London, including the East Smithfield plague pits , and in Denmark.Within those regions, the researchers identified four locations on chromosomes where they saw strong evidence of genetic changes that appeared to have been driven by the Black Death. In follow-up work, one change stood out: an increase in the frequency of a variant of
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