4,000-year-old plague DNA found -- the oldest cases to date in Britain


Date:
May 30, 2023
Source:
The Francis Crick Institute
Summary:
Researchers have identified three 4,000-year-old British cases
of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria causing the plague -- the oldest
evidence of the plague in Britain to date.


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==========================================================================
FULL STORY ========================================================================== Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute have identified three
4,000-year-old British cases of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria causing
the plague -- the oldest evidence of the plague in Britain to date,
reported in a paper published today in Nature Communications.

Working with the University of Oxford, the Levens Local History Group and
the Wells and Mendip Museum, the team identified two cases of Yersinia
pestis in human remains found in a mass burial in Charterhouse Warren
in Somerset and one in a ring cairn monument in Levens in Cumbria.

They took small skeletal samples from 34 individuals across the two sites, screening for the presence of Yersinia pestisin teeth. This technique is performed in a specialist clean room facility where they drill into the
tooth and extract dental pulp, which can trap DNA remnants of infectious diseases.

They then analysed the DNA and identified three cases of Yersinia pestis
in two children estimated to be aged between 10-12 years old when they
died, and one woman aged between 35-45. Radiocarbon dating was used to
show it's likely the three people lived at roughly the same time.

The plague has previously been identified in several individuals from
Eurasia between 5,000 and 2,500 years before present (BP), a period
spanning the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age (termed LNBA), but hadn't been
seen before in Britain at this point in time. The wide geographic spread suggests that this strain of the plague may have been easily transmitted.

This strain of the plague -- the LNBA lineage -- was likely brought
into Central and Western Europe around 4,800 BP by humans expanding into Eurasia, and now this research suggests that it extended to Britain.

Using genome sequencing, the researchers showed that this strain of the Yersinia pestis looks very similar to the strain identified in Eurasia
at the same time.

The individuals identified all lacked the yapCand ymtgenes, which are
seen in later strains of plague, the latter of which is known to play
an important role in plague transmission via fleas. This information has previously suggested that this strain of the plague was not transmitted
via fleas, unlike later plague strains such as the one that caused the
Black Death.

Because pathogenic DNA -- DNA from bacteria, protozoa, or viruses
which cause disease -- degrades very quickly in samples which might be incomplete or eroded, it's also possible that other individuals at these
burial sites may have been infected with the same strain of plague.

The Charterhouse Warren site is rare as it doesn't match other funeral
sites from the time period -- the individuals buried there appear to have
died from trauma. The researchers speculate that the mass burial wasn't
due to an outbreak of plague but individuals may have been infected at
the time they died.

Pooja Swali, first author and PhD student at the Crick, said, "The ability
to detect ancient pathogens from degraded samples, from thousands of
years ago, is incredible. These genomes can inform us of the spread
and evolutionary changes of pathogens in the past, and hopefully help
us understand which genes may be important in the spread of infectious diseases. We see that this Yersinia pestis lineage, including genomes
from this study, loses genes over time, a pattern that has emerged
with later epidemics caused by the same pathogen." Pontus Skoglund,
group leader of the Ancient Genomics Laboratory at the Crick, said,
"This research is a new piece of the puzzle in our understanding of the
ancient genomic record of pathogens and humans, and how we co-evolved.

"We understand the huge impact of many historical plague outbreaks, such
as the Black Death, on human societies and health, but ancient DNA can
document infectious disease much further into the past. Future research
will do more to understand how our genomes responded to such diseases in
the past, and the evolutionary arms race with the pathogens themselves,
which can help us to understand the impact of diseases in the present
or in the future."
* RELATED_TOPICS
o Health_&_Medicine
# Infectious_Diseases # Foodborne_Illness # Genes
o Plants_&_Animals
# Microbes_and_More # Veterinary_Medicine #
Evolutionary_Biology
o Fossils_&_Ruins
# Fossils # Ancient_Civilizations # Evolution
* RELATED_TERMS
o Bubonic_plague o Head_injury o Flea o Legionnaires'_disease
o Pest_(animal) o Microorganism o Bacteria o Yellow_fever

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by The_Francis_Crick_Institute. Note:
Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Related Multimedia:
* Map_and_images_of_bronze_age_pottery ========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Pooja Swali, Rick Schulting, Alexandre Gilardet, Monica Kelly,
Kyriaki
Anastasiadou, Isabelle Glocke, Jesse McCabe, Mia Williams, Tony
Audsley, Louise Loe, Teresa Ferna'ndez-Crespo, Javier Ordon~o,
David Walker, Tom Clare, Geoff Cook, Ian Hodkinson, Mark Simpson,
Stephen Read, Tom Davy, Marina Silva, Mateja Hajdinjak, Anders
Bergstro"m, Thomas Booth, Pontus Skoglund. Yersinia pestis genomes
reveal plague in Britain 4000 years ago. Nature Communications,
2023; 14 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-38393-w ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/05/230530125355.htm

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