Journal article
17th Century Variola Virus Reveals the Recent History of Smallpox
AT Duggan, MF Perdomo, D Piombino-Mascali, S Marciniak, D Poinar, MV Emery, JP Buchmann, S Duchêne, R Jankauskas, M Humphreys, GB Golding, J Southon, A Devault, JM Rouillard, JW Sahl, O Dutour, K Hedman, A Sajantila, GL Smith, EC Holmes Show all
Current Biology | CELL PRESS | Published : 2016
Abstract
Smallpox holds a unique position in the history of medicine. It was the first disease for which a vaccine was developed and remains the only human disease eradicated by vaccination. Although there have been claims of smallpox in Egypt, India, and China dating back millennia [1–4], the timescale of emergence of the causative agent, variola virus (VARV), and how it evolved in the context of increasingly widespread immunization, have proven controversial [4–9]. In particular, some molecular-clock-based studies have suggested that key events in VARV evolution only occurred during the last two centuries [4–6] and hence in apparent conflict with anecdotal historical reports, although it is difficu..
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Awarded by Jane ja Aatos Erkon Säätiö
Funding Acknowledgements
M.F.P. and K.H. are funded by the Helsinki University Hospital Research and Education Fund, the Finnish-Norwegian Medical Foundation, the Academy of Finland (grant no. 1257964), the Medical Society of Finland, the Sigrid Juselius Foundation, and the Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation. D.P.-M. has been supported by the Education Exchange Support Foundation, Ministry of Education and Science, Republic of Lithuania. G.L.S. is a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow. E.C.H. is funded by an NHMRC Australia Fellowship (grant no. GNT1037231). A.T.D., E.C.H., and H.P. are supported by NHMRC grant GNT1065106. H.P. is supported by a Canada Research Chair, NSERC, SSHRC, CIFAR, and McMaster University. We thank current and former members of the McMaster Ancient DNA Centre, C. Pepperell, and I.H. for their input. We are especially grateful to Agnius Urbanavicius, Justina Kozakaite, and Daumantas Liekis for their precious support during this research. A.D. and J.-M.R. are both employed at MYcroarray and provided the bait set used here. We thank the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research (IIDR) for generous seed funding for this work.