Kate Kelland of Reuters news service wrote this one and I'm linking to the Chicago Tribune article about it.
"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... Building on previous research which 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... For this study Poinar's team analysed skeletal remains from Black Death victims buried in London's East Smithfield "plague pits," which are located under what is now the Royal Mint.By focusing on promising specimens from the dental pulp of five bodies, which had already been pre-screened for the presence of Y. pestis, they were able to extract, purify and enrich the disease's DNA and at the same time reduce the amount of background non-plague DNA which might interfere."
