In 1979, nearly 100 inhabitants of the city of Sverdlovsk had suddenly
succumbed to virulent anthrax infections. Soviet-era officials denied
that the military had any involvement in the catastrophe, even though
the town contained a large military facility. The denial was not
surprising because a few years prior to the incident the USSR had signed
and ratified—along with a number of other nation states, including the
U.S.—the Biological Weapons Convention, which prohibited the
development, production, and stockpiling of biological and chemical
weapons. However, it was widely rumored that the Soviets still had a
major biological weapons program in play.
Now, almost 40 years after the Sverdlovsk incident, a new study from
investigators at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen)
and Northern Arizona University (NAU) was able to assemble the anthrax
genome—using deep DNA sequencing methods—from victims of the 1979
outbreak.
Data: 08.09.2016
Fonte: www.genengnews.com
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