Scientists have mapped out the entire genetic map of the Black Death, a 14th Century bubonic plague that killed 50m Europeans in one of the most devastating epidemics in history.
The work, which involved extracting and purifying DNA from the remains of Black death victims buried in London's "plague pits", is the first time scientists have been able to draft a reconstructed genome of any ancient pathogen.
Their result - a full draft of the entire Black Death genome - should allow researchers to track changes in the disease's evolution and virulence, and lead to better understanding of modern-day infectious diseases.
They say the pathogen is the ancestor of all modern plagues.
The research, published in the journal Nature, suggests the 14th century outbreak was also the first plague pandemic in history.
Building on previous research that showed that a specific variant of the Yersinia pestis (Y. pestis) bacterium was responsible for the plague that ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351, a team of German, Canadian and American scientists went on to "capture" and sequence the entire genome of the disease.
Experts say the direct descendants of the same bubonic plague still exist today, killing around 2,000 people a year.
A virulent strain of E coli bacteria, which caused a deadly outbreak of infections in Germany and France earlier this year, was also found to contain DNA sequences from plague bacteria.
