Major historical dietary changes are reflected in the dental microbiome of ancient skeletons

Antti Sajantila

doi:10.1186/2041-2223-4-10

Abstract

The post-industrial lifestyle has many disadvantageous effects on our health. One of the factors is modern nutrition, which has been associated with epidemic burdens, such as obesity and cardiovascular diseases. At least two major shifts have occurred in the nutritional history of humans: the use of carbohydrate-rich diets which were adopted around 10,000 years BP due to Neolithic farming, and later the influence of industrially processed flour and white sugar after the industrial revolution in the 1850s. In a recent paper in Nature Genetics Adler et al. used a novel approach to see how these dietary changes affected the oral microbiome by analyzing the ancient microbial DNA in the calcified dental plaque from 34 early European skeletons.

Highlights

The post-industrial lifestyle has many disadvantageous effects on our health
The authors needed to show that their data represent authentic microbial sequences. They could show that the calculus from ancient teeth was dominated by Firmicutes bacteria, which were found in a frequency comparable to those found in modern oral samples, and in the Human Oral Microbiome Database (HOMD), whereas the control samples were dominated by Proteobacteria, typically found in clean-room environment and non-template controls
Further data on the authenticity of the microbes in the ancient calculus was indicated by the β-diversity and Correspondence: antti.sajantila@helsinki.fi Department of Forensic Medicine, Hjelt Institute, University of Helsinki, Kytosuontie 11, Helsinki 00300, Finland cluster analysis of the V1, V3 and V6 sequences, which showed more similarity among the ancient and modern calculus, plaque and saliva than among the ancient and environmental samples