AMAD
"Archivum Medii Aevi Digitale - Specialized open access repository for research in the middle ages"To submission
| Date: | 2018 |
| Title: | Ancient genomes reveal a high diversity of Mycobacterium leprae in medieval Europe. |
| Author: | Pálfi, György Schuenemann, Verena J Avanzi, Charlotte Krause-Kyora, Ben Seitz, Alexander Herbig, Alexander Inskip, Sarah Alice Bonazzi, Marion Reiter, Ella Urban, Christian Dangvard Pedersen, Dorthe Taylor, G Michael Singh, Pushpendra Stewart, Graham R Velemínský, Petr Likovsky, Jakub Marcsik, Antónia Molnár, Erika Mariotti, Valentina Riga, Alessandro Belcastro, M Giovanna Boldsen, Jesper L Nebel, Almut Mays, Simon Donoghue, Helen D Zakrzewski, Sonia Benjak, Andrej Nieselt, Kay Cole, Stewart T Krause, Johannes |
| Description: | Studying ancient DNA allows us to retrace the evolutionary history of human pathogens, such as Mycobacterium leprae, the main causative agent of leprosy. Leprosy is one of the oldest recorded and most stigmatizing diseases in human history. The disease was prevalent in Europe until the 16th century and is still endemic in many countries with over 200,000 new cases reported annually. Previous worldwide studies on modern and European medieval M. leprae genomes revealed that they cluster into several distinct branches of which two were present in medieval northwestern Europe (cite Schuenemann 2013 and Benjak 2018). In this study, we analyzed 10 new medieval M. leprae genomes including the so far oldest M. leprae genome from one of the earliest known cases of leprosy in the United Kingdom—a skeleton from the Great Chesterford cemetery with a calibrated age of 415–545 CE. This dataset provides a genetic time transect of M. leprae diversity in Europe over the past 1500 years. We find four distinct M. leprae lineages to be present in the early Medieval Period, and three lineages were detected within a single cemetery from the high Medieval Period. Altogether these findings suggest a greater genetic diversity of M. leprae strains in medieval Europe at various time points than previously assumed. The resulting more complex picture of the past phylogeography of leprosy in Europe impacts current phylogeographical models of M. leprae dissemination. It suggests alternative models for the past spread of leprosy such as a wide spread prevalence of different branches in Eurasia already in Antiquity or maybe even an origin in Western Eurasia. Furthermore, these results highlight how studying ancient M. leprae strains improves understanding the history of leprosy worldwide. |
| URI: | https://www.amad.org/jspui/handle/123456789/58329 |
| Other Identifier: | https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.27242 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/279874 |
| AMAD ID: | 563647 |
| Appears in Collections: | BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) General history of Europe |
