Bioarchaeology of ancient pathogens: Tracking ancient zoonosis in Southwest Asia - Louis L’hôte скачать в хорошем качестве

Bioarchaeology of ancient pathogens: Tracking ancient zoonosis in Southwest Asia - Louis L’hôte

Bioarchaeology of ancient pathogens: Tracking ancient zoonosis across the domestication process in Southwest Asia - Louis L’hôte, Smurfit Institute of Genetics, Trinity college, Dublin, Ireland The Neolithic period in Southwest Asia was marked by the domestication of livestock, significantly impacting human health by providing a stable source of animal protein and secondary products. This increased interaction between humans and animals likely heightened the risk of disease transmission, both within herds and between species. Recently, ancient DNA techniques have enabled the recovery of numerous key human pathogens, such as Yersinia pestis, the agent of the Black Death, or the variola virus, which caused 300–500 million deaths in the 20th century. Despite these advancements, relatively few livestock and zoonotic pathogen genomes have been recovered to date. This presentation will provide a state-of-the-art overview of the ancient pathogen field and present new findings on zoonotic and animal pathogens from various species and periods. These insights reveal these pathogens' evolutionary trajectories and spread during the domestication process in Southwest Asia. Among these findings, we report the recovery of an ancient genome of Brucella melitensis from a Neolithic sheep in Menteşe, Turkey (6024–5842 cal BCE), the bacterium responsible for brucellosis, currently the most prevalent bacterial zoonosis.