Yersinia pestis
1
8.2
- noun
- /jɜrˈsɪniə ˈpɛstɪs/
- Specialized
- Scientists have identified Yersinia pestis as the agent responsible for the bubonic plague outbreak in medieval Europe.
Examples
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Yersinia pestis is the bacterium that causes the deadly disease known as plague.
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As frightening as a totally antibiotic-resistant Yersinia pestis bacteria is, it remains "child's play" compared to the more advanced recombination DNA technology used in most biowar programs.
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Yersinia pestis, being a bacterium, is massive when compared to a virus, and is easily treated with modern antibiotics.
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The Yersinia pestis bacteria was exposed to every then-known antibiotic in a process that any advanced high school or early undergraduate college
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The Black Death bubonic pandemic, believed to be caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, is estimated to have killed between a third and two-thirds of Europe's population after it spread to Europe in 1347 from Southwestern/Central Asia.
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Research on Yersinia pestis helps us understand how the plague spreads among humans and other mammals.
Surface Forms
Morphology
This is a scientific binomial where the genus name 'Yersinia' denotes a bacterium and the species epithet 'pestis' denotes plague/disease; if a learner knows those constituent meanings, the compound meaning (a bacterium associated with plague) is directly inferable. Binomial naming is a regular, cross-linguistic scientific pattern, so the overall meaning is compositional rather than idiomatic.
Etymology
Yersinia pestis comes from the scientist Alexandre Yersin, who gave his name to Yersinia, and from the old Latin word pestis meaning 'plague'. So the name can be remembered as 'Yersin's plague', which explains why it is the germ that causes 'plague'.