Bubonic plague and genetic change: how the Black Death helped the immune genes to evolve. From the article:

When the bubonic plague arrived in London in 1348, the disease devastated the city. So many people died, so quickly, that the city’s cemeteries filled up….

Now a new study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, shows that the Black Death altered more than society: It also likely altered the evolution of the European people’s genome.

In the study, [geneticist Luis] Barreiro and his colleagues found that Black Death survivors in London and Denmark had an edge in their genes – mutations that helped protect against the plague pathogen, Yersinia pestis. Survivors passed those mutations onto their descendants, and many Europeans still carry those mutations today.

But that edge comes at a cost: It increases a person’s risk of autoimmune diseases. “The exact same genetic variant that we find to be protective against Yersinia pestis is associated with an increased risk for Crohn’s disease today,” Barreiro says.

The study demonstrates how past pandemics could prepare the human immune system to survive future pandemics.

“The evolution is faster and stronger than anything we’ve seen before in the human genome,” says evolutionary biologist David Enard at the University of Arizona, who wasn’t involved in the study. “It’s really a big deal. It shows what’s possible [for humans], in terms of adaptation in response to many different pathogens.”

For a related news release, see here.

For the study in Nature, see here.

For other posts on plague and humanities, see here.