Local tales in the small, central-England village of Eyam tell befuddling stories of plague survivors who had close contact with the bacterium but never caught the disease. Dr. O'Brien's
...work with HIV and the mutated form of the gene CCR5, called "delta 32," led him to Eyam. In 1996, research showed that delta 32 prevents HIV from entering human cells and infecting the body. O'Brien thought this principle could be applied to the plague bacteria, which affects the body in a similar manner. To determine whether the Eyam plague survivors may have carried delta 32, O'Brien tested the DNA of their modern-day descendents. What he found out was startling ...Read the whole thing.
3 comments:
knuckle,
If I read it right, I think Eyam was of importance because it had remained relatively isolated, at least from a view of genetics, over the centuries.
The present population was largely descendents of the older plague ravanged town.
Knucklehead,
I suspect that the cities had much more mixing and immigration which would dilute the genes. In contrast, the genetic pool in some English villages has been remarkably stable. ISTR a case where a body from Celtic times was exhumed from a bog where it had been preserved and its DNA compared to that of the inhabitants of a nearby village. The match was exceedingly good. I can't say more precisely than that because I don't remember the details.
In any case, there is a gene, maybe the same one, that is fairly prevalent in the European population but not elsewhere. The hypothesis is (was?) that it was due to selection during the plague. I wish I knew more about the details, maybe someday someone will publish a book setting forth all these interesting little snippets from current research.
Not all aspects of a thin gene broth are to be avoided, heh?
Iceland has the same "problem". I think they see it as an opportunity to set themselves up as center of genetic studies and sell access to genealogical information. I don't know how good their records are; that was evidently another important aspect of the Eyam study.
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