A “shriveled piece of intestine” from an unfortunate, unknown victim of Philadelphia’s 1849 outbreak of cholera has given researchers just enough material for them to decode the DNA of the bacteria that struck him down.
So reports Tom Avril of the Philadelphia Inquirer, adding that while the sequencing of this historical, and historic, cholera will be “of no immediate help to doctors who treat the modern form of the disease,” it will “offer clues as to how the microbe has tweaked itself to remain a deadly fixture in the human experience.”
Read the full, original story: Decoding the genome of the cholera responsible for Philadelphia’s 19th century outbreak
