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  • RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT

A 102-year-old bacterial culture reveals a microbe’s foul methods

A strain of cholera bacterium collected during the First World War is sequenced after decades in storage.
A group of World War One soldiers in front of the Sphinx and Pyramids of Egypt

Soldiers in Egypt during the First World War. A strain of cholera bacterium isolated from a soldier hospitalized in Egypt during the war was found to lack classic cholera toxin. Credit: Bettman/Getty

In 1916, against the backdrop of the First World War, a British soldier in an Egyptian hospital recovered from a bout of diarrhoea. More than a century later, scientists have revived a freeze-dried culture of a microbe that infected him — thought to be the oldest publicly available cholera bacterium in existence.

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Nature 568, 279 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-01136-3

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