A Flagstaff geneticist has discovered the molecular fingerprint of a deadly strain of anthrax stockpiled during the Cold War in the then-Soviet Union.
Using new DNA sequencing, Paul Keim's team has pieced together more information about an anthrax leak in 1979 in the city of Sverdlosk. It killed dozens of people and animals. Keim used preserved tissue samples from some of the victims to determine the strain.
" Now we have the whole genome of the strain that the Soviets were using in their weapons program," Keim says. "We can go and look at all the genes, we can look for evidence that they had been genetically manipulating those strains, whether they were drug resistant, or they had produced what's called a 'vaccine beater', a 'vaccine buster' strain, and we can look for the signatures in the DNA of that". Keim adds, "what we found was that their production strain appears to be something very close to what we would see in nature."
Keim says the new sequencing technology means scientists can determine whether future anthrax outbreaks came from the left-over Soviet anthrax.
"We now have a DNA fingerprint based upon the whole genome of the Soviet weapons strain. And so if that were to suddenly show up in an anthrax outbreak, we'd be able to say this is manmade, not just a natural outbreak. We would actually then have the ability to trace that back to different sources."
The new research could help determine if an anthrax outbreak is actually a criminal event.
