Ancient Mycobacterium leprae genomes from the mediaeval sites of Chichester and Raunds in England

Abstract

We examined six skeletons from mediaeval contexts from two sites in England for the presence of Mycobacterium leprae DNA, each of the skeletons displaying osteological indicators of leprosy. Polymerase chain reactions directed at the species-specific RLEP multicopy sequence produced positive results with three skeletons, these being among those with the clearest osteological signs of leprosy. Following in-solution hybridization capture, sufficient sequence reads were obtained to cover >70% of the M. leprae genomes from these three skeletons, with a mean read depth of 4-10. Two skeletons from a mediaeval hospital in Chichester, UK, dating to the 14 th-17 th centuries AD, contained M. leprae strains of subtype 3I, which has previously been reported in mediaeval England. The third skeleton, from a churchyard cemetery at Raunds Furnells, UK, dating to the 10 th to mid-12 th centuries AD, carried subtype 3K, which has been recorded at 7 th-13 th century AD sites in Turkey, Hungary and Denmark, but not previously in Britain. We suggest that travellers to the Holy Land might have been responsible for the transmission of subtype 3K from southeast Europe to Britain.

Ancient DNA typing indicates that the “new” glume wheat of early Eurasian agriculture is a cultivated member of the Triticum timopheevii group

“…The technical regime is the same as that used by us in other projects, for example in genotyping of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Mycobacterium leprae DNA in human bones (e.g. Bouwman et al, 2012;Kerudin et al, 2019), where contamination with PCR amplicons would be evident when next-generation sequencing reads are mapped to the reference sequences. We have never observed such contamination.…”

Compounding vulnerabilities: Syndemics and the social determinants of disease in the past

“…MTB bacilli travel to bone through the circulatory system and favor areas of hematopoietic marrow in the skeleton such as the vertebral bodies and long bone epiphyses in adults with additional foci in flat bones of the crania and diaphyses of long bones in children (Lewis, 2018;Roberts and Buikstra, 2019). The common diagnostic lesions of skeletal MTB are resorptive foci in the vertebral bodies and joint regions, with the less-specific abnormal bone formation on the pleural surface of ribs providing an additional indicator (Roberts and Buikstra, 2019).The extraction and identification of M. tuberculosis complex DNA in skeletal remains has provided an additional pathway to diagnosis (Harkins et al, 2015;Kerudin et al, 2019;Müller et al, 2014;Sabin et al, 2020;Zink et al, 2003), and has demonstrated that MTB diagnosis based on skeletal lesions alone undercounts the number of people infected in ancient communities.…”