Title: Ancient DNA and the deep evolutionary ecology of plague infections in humans
Abstract: Ancient genomes from pathogens provide a means of directly observing genome evolution through time, in response to host co-evolution.Yersinia pestis provides a prominent example of this as the cause of plague. In this talk, I will discuss recent and ongoing research from ancient genomes of Yersinia pestis in the oldest known outbreaks of this disease (among prehistoric hunter-gatherers at Lake Baikal) where resulting mortality profiles appear to correspond to the presence of distinct virulence factors, along with findings from other unpublished data. In particular, the question of whether pathogens such as Y. pestis underwent attenuation of virulence in prehistoric contexts (where no documentation for pandemic-like scenarios in humans or animal hosts exists) is of particular interest. This will also focus on the zoonotic side of this disease, and consider ongoing questions as to its effect on selection in humans.
Biography: Ruairidh Macleod is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at All Souls' College, Oxford, since October 2025; prior to that, he was a postdoc with Prof. Mark Thomas at UCL for a year, and undertook his PhD at the University of Cambridge, working on ancient human genomes and supervised by Prof. Eske Willerslev. His work in Oxford centres on palaeo-pathogenomics, metagenomics and human evolution. He also has visiting affiliations at the Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen and the Genomics Institute, University of Tartu.
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