RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Millennia of genomic stability within the invasive Para C Lineage of Salmonella enterica JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 105759 DO 10.1101/105759 A1 Zhemin Zhou A1 Inge Lundstrøm A1 Alicia Tran-Dien A1 Sebastián Duchêne A1 Nabil-Fareed Alikhan A1 Martin J. Sergeant A1 Gemma Langridge A1 Anna K. Fotakis A1 Satheesh Nair A1 Hans K. Stenøien A1 Stian S. Hamre A1 Sherwood Casjens A1 Axel Christophersen A1 Christopher Quince A1 Nicholas R. Thomson A1 François-Xavier Weill A1 Simon Y.W. Ho A1 M. Thomas P. Gilbert A1 Mark Achtman YR 2017 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/02/14/105759.abstract AB 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.