Article
On the origin of smallpox: correlating variola phylogenics with historical smallpox records.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America - 2 Oct 2007
Li Yu, Carroll Darin S, Gardner Shea N, Walsh Matthew C, Vitalis Elizabeth A, Damon Inger K
Abstract excerpt
Human disease likely attributable to variola virus (VARV), the etiologic agent of smallpox, has been reported in human populations for >2,000 years. VARV is unique among orthopoxviruses in that it is an exclusively human pathogen. Because VARV has a large, slowly evolving DNA genome, we were able to construct a robust phylogeny of VARV by analyzing concatenated single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from genome...
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