September 25, 2019, by Aleisha Turner

Plague in the UK!

Researchers at the University of Nottingham thought that they had discovered an occurrences of the bacteria that causes plague in a rats from Liverpool and Vancouver.

They were using a widely used microarray based platform specifically designed to identify zoonotic pathogens. By supplementing their analysis with metagenomics sequencing we were able to interrogate the validity of their finding and subsequently identified that at least one unknown bacterium must shares a homologue of the diagnostic gene used. Because of this analysis we were able to publish a report in PeerJ that one of the main diagnosis genes used in the field may be more widely distributed than previously thought.

Giles, T.A., Greenwood, A.D., Tsangaras, K., Giles, T.C., Barrow, P.A., Hannant, D., Abu-Median, A.B. and Yon, L., 2016. Detection of a Yersinia pestis gene homologue in rodent samples. PeerJ, 4, p.e2216.

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter
• Share on Google+
• Share on LinkedIn