Johannes Krause

Johannes Krause (born July 17, 1980, in Leinefelde) is a German biochemist with a research focus on historical infectious diseases and human evolution.

In 2005 he obtained his diploma with the publication The mitochondrial genome of the woolly mammoth at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, followed by a doctoral dissertation in 2008 under Svante Pääbo entitled From genes to genomes: Applications for multiplex PCR in Ancient DNA Research regarding genetic investigations into Neanderthals and cave bears.

Along with Russell Gray, Krause was appointed co-director of a new Max Planck Institute of History and the Sciences, starting February 1, 2014.

[4] In 2010, Krause and others successfully reconstructed the mitochondrial DNA of a Denisovan individual from 30 milligrams of powdered material from a finger bone.

This enabled him to demonstrate that the Denisovans represented an independent branch of the genus Homo which diverged from the Neanderthal lineage 640,000 years ago.

[7][8] Krause was part of the international research team which in 2011 reconstructed the genome of the bacterium Yersinia pestis from DNA samples extracted from the 14th-century East Smithfield plague cemetery in London, establishing definitive proof that the medieval Black Death epidemic was caused by Yersinia pestis.

Their study looked at 90 individuals and revealed that they "closely resembled ancient and modern Near Eastern populations, especially those in the Levant, and had almost no DNA from sub-Saharan Africa.