How a flesh-eater evolved

摘要

A deadly wave of flesh-eating bacteria emerged in the 1980s when a single cell gained a pair of toxin genes from another bacterium. Infections with group A Streptococcus (GAS) strains, which cause necrotizing fasciitis, spiked worldwide in the late 1980s and early 1990s. To piece together the sequence of molecular events behind this epidemic, James Musser at the Houston Methodist Research Institute in Texas and his team sequenced the genomes of 3,615 GAS strains isolated from Europe and North America between 1969 and 2013.