Research pair learn how plague bacterium adapted to help fleas pass on disease
Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - 10:30
in Biology & Nature
(Phys.org)—A pair of researchers with NIH has discovered the evolutionary path that a bacterium that causes the plague took to allow for transmission via fleas. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Iman Chouikha and Joseph Hinnebusch describe how they studied the bacterium and its genes to learn how it adapted to become less lethal to fleas and thus better able to infect more hosts.