TY - JOUR T1 - Millennia of genomic stability within the invasive Para C Lineage of <em>Salmonella enterica</em> JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/105759 SP - 105759 AU - Zhemin Zhou AU - Inge Lundstrøm AU - Alicia Tran-Dien AU - Sebastián Duchêne AU - Nabil-Fareed Alikhan AU - Martin J. Sergeant AU - Gemma Langridge AU - Anna K. Fotakis AU - Satheesh Nair AU - Hans K. Stenøien AU - Stian S. Hamre AU - Sherwood Casjens AU - Axel Christophersen AU - Christopher Quince AU - Nicholas R. Thomson AU - François-Xavier Weill AU - Simon Y.W. Ho AU - M. Thomas P. Gilbert AU - Mark Achtman Y1 - 2017/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/02/14/105759.abstract N2 - Salmonella enterica serovar Paratyphi C is the causative agent of enteric (paratyphoid) fever. While today a potentially lethal infection of humans that occurs in Africa and Asia, early 20th century observations in Eastern Europe suggest it may once have had a wider-ranging impact on human societies. We recovered a draft Paratyphi C genome from the 800-year-old skeleton of a young woman in Trondheim, Norway, who likely died of enteric fever. Analysis of this genome against a new, significantly expanded database of related modern genomes demonstrated that Paratyphi C is descended from the ancestors of swine pathogens, serovars Choleraesuis and Typhisuis, together forming the Para C Lineage. Our results indicate that Paratyphi C has been a pathogen of humans for at least 1,000 years, and may have evolved after zoonotic transfer from swine during the Neolithic period.One Sentence Summary The combination of an 800-year-old Salmonella enterica Paratyphi C genome with genomes from extant bacteria reshapes our understanding of this pathogen’s origins and evolution. ER -