#yersinia

"Yersinia - god of diseases"

An attack on StarsySpirit's wonderful character - Yersinia! As I read their title "god of diseases" I immediately thought of fungi (since they're one of the most common pathogens causing diseases) so I tried to frame the picture in fungi fibers, well… not seen very well here ^^;

Passing on Plague

Yersinia pestis picked up several tricks. One is yersinia murine toxin (Ymt), a protein that helps it colonise the gut of fleas, its vectors between mammal hosts. Pictured are sections of flea guts, showing the thin oesophagus connecting to the larger midgut, after they were fed blood containing mutant Y. pestis, lacking Ymt. If acquired from mouse (top panels) or human blood, these bacteria struggle to take hold and are quickly eliminated. By contrast, when ingested with brown rat blood (below), which fleas take longer to digest, Y. pestis can persist even in the absence of Ymt. Variation between species suggests ancient strains lacking Ymt could already use fleas to move between certain hosts. Gaining Ymt then opened the door to much greater flea-borne transmission, between more species, highlighting how genetic innovations can alter the course of disease history.

Written by Emmanuelle Briolat

Image adapted from work by David M. Bland and colleagues

Laboratory of Bacteriology, Rocky Mountain Laboratories, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH, Hamilton, MT, USA

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in PLOS Pathogens, October 2021

“Oh god....it’s Epithet erased...”

Anyways! This is Dr Yersinia Pestis, a very stressed 40 year old woman who has the epithet: Rot, which allows her to rot anything and she’ll turn people to a zombie like state