AnthraxUrban legend: WWI-era “viable” anthrax strain was, in fact, much younger standard laboratory strain

Published 1 May 2017

A team of international researchers has found that a strain of anthrax-causing bacterium thought to have been viable eighty years after a thwarted First World War espionage attack, was, in reality, a much younger standard laboratory strain. The team speculates that the mix-up was due to commonplace laboratory contamination. In 1917, German spy Baron Otto von Rosen was caught in Norway possessing lumps of sugar embedded with glass capillaries filled with a liquid holding spores of Bacillus anthracis, the bacterium that causes anthrax. He was suspected of plotting to feed the sugar lumps, which contained the oldest known isolates of B. anthracis, to the reindeer that pulled transports of munitions and foods across the frozen Arctic tundra for the Allied forces.

A team of international researchers has found that a strain of anthrax-causing bacterium thought to have been viable eighty years after a thwarted First World War espionage attack, was, in reality, a much younger standard laboratory strain. The team speculates that the mix-up was due to commonplace laboratory contamination.

The study, published this week in mBio, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology, highlights the advances in genomic sequencing that now enable precise tracking of bacterial strains used in biological warfare and terrorist attacks around the world.

“Historically, there have always been bacterial strain mix-ups in the course of doing research,” says Paul Keim, executive director of the Pathogen and Microbiome Institute at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff and senior author on the current study. “But now that we have the molecular tools, we can do the quality control on strain collections to figure out exactly what they contain.”

ASM says that the current study helps debunk the claim that a First World War biological weapon containing anthrax-causing spores was still viable eighty years later. In 1917, German spy Baron Otto von Rosen was caught in Norway possessing lumps of sugar embedded with glass capillaries filled with a liquid holding spores of Bacillus anthracis, the bacterium that causes anthrax. He was suspected of plotting to feed the sugar lumps, which contained the oldest known isolates of B. anthracis, to the reindeer that pulled transports of munitions and foods across the frozen Arctic tundra for the Allied forces.

The poison-laced sugar remained in a Norwegian police museum until 1997, when it was sent to what is now known as the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory in Porton Down, United Kingdom. Researchers there used DNA amplification to determine that the agent inside the tiny glass tubes was indeed B. anthracis. After some extensive laboratory coaxing, they next cultured and isolated four colonies grown from the liquid inside the tubes. In a 1998 Nature paper, they declared that they had revived the anthrax bacterial strain that had spent 8 decades as spores.