We review our ecological understanding of wildlife infectious diseases from the individual
host to the ecosystem scale, highlighting where conceptual thinking lacks verification …

Microbiologic infections acquired from animals, known as zoonoses, pose a risk to public
health. An estimated 60% of emerging human pathogens are zoonotic. Of these …

The genetic diversity of Yersinia pestis, the etiologic agent of plague, is extremely limited
because of its recent origin coupled with a slow clock rate. Here we identified 2,326 SNPs …

▪ Abstract For more than a century, scientists have investigated the natural history of plague,
a highly fatal disease caused by infection with the gram-negative bacterium Yersinia pestis …

Genetically monomorphic bacteria contain so little sequence diversity that sequencing a few
gene fragments yields little or no information. As a result, our understanding of their …

The association of historical plague pandemics with Yersinia pestis remains controversial,
partly because the evolutionary history of this largely monomorphic bacterium was unknown …

Many genomic sequences have been recently published for bacteria that can replicate only
within eukaryotic hosts. Comparisons of genomic features with those of closely related …

The spread of parasites is inherently a spatial process often embedded in physically
complex landscapes. It is therefore not surprising that infectious disease researchers are …

A revolutionary book that presents analytical tools for understanding why a particular
disease is transmitted within a specific geographic area. A. Townsend Peterson, one of the …

Black-footed ferrets (Mustela nigripes) require extensive prairie dog colonies (Cynomys
spp.) to provide habitat and prey. Epizootic plague kills both prairie dogs and ferrets and is a …