‘Lost’ microbial genes found in dental plaque of ancient humans

About 19,000 years ago, a woman died in northern Spain. Her body was deliberately buried with pieces of the natural pigment ochre and placed behind a block of limestone in a cave known as El Mirón. When her ochre-dyed bones were unearthed in 2010, archaeologists dubbed her the Red Lady. The careful treatment of her body provided scientists with insights into how people from the time buried their dead. Now, thanks to the poor oral hygiene of that period, her teeth are helping illuminate a vanished world of bacteria and their chemical creations. From dental calculus, the rock-hard plaque that accumulates on teeth, researchers have successfully recovered and reconstructed the genetic material of bacteria living in the mouth of the Red Lady and dozens of other ancient individuals. The gene reconstructions, reported today in Science , were accurate enough to replicate the enzymes the bacteria produced to help digest nutrients . “Just the fact that they were able to reconstruct the genome from a puzzle with millions of pieces is a great achievement,” says Gary Toranzos, an environmental microbiologist at the University of Puerto Rico who wasn’t involved in the work. “It’s ‘hold my beer, and watch me do it,’ and boy did they do it.” Changes in diet and the introduction of antibiotics have dramatically altered the modern human microbiome, says University of Trento computational biologist Nicola Segata, who als...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news