Paleoproteomics of the Dental Pulp: The plague paradigm.

Rémi Barbieri,Michel Drancourt,Eric Chabrière,Gérard Aboudharam,Michel Signoli,Stéfan Tzortzis,Anthony Levasseur,Rania Mekni,David Caramelli

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0180552

Abstract

Chemical decomposition and fragmentation may limit the detection of ancient host and microbial DNA while some proteins can be detected for extended periods of time. We applied paleoproteomics on 300-year-old dental pulp specimens recovered from 16 individuals in two archeological funeral sites in France, comprising one documented plague site and one documented plague-negative site. The dental pulp paleoproteome of the 16 teeth comprised 439 peptides representative of 30 proteins of human origin and 211 peptides representative of 27 proteins of non-human origin. Human proteins consisted of conjunctive tissue and blood proteins including IgA immunoglobulins. Four peptides were indicative of three presumable Yersinia pestis proteins detected in 3/8 dental pulp specimens from the plague-positive site but not in the eight dental pulp specimens collected in the plague-negative site. Paleoproteomics applied to the dental pulp is a new and innovative approach to screen ancient individuals for the detection of blood-borne pathogens and host inflammatory response.

Highlights

The discovery and the characterization of microbes in ancient environmental and human specimens expanded the knowledge about the evolution of microbiota and pathogens and rose new paradigms concerning the dynamics of deadly epidemics [1]
An expanding knowledge of the evolution of pathogens such as Yersinia pestis [6, 7], Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Mycobacterium leprae [8] and variola [9] helped reconstitute the dynamics of past devastating epidemics caused by these pathogens
Data here reported indicate that four peptides corresponding among others to Y. pestis proteins have been detected in three individuals exhumed from a documented 18th

Summary

Introduction

The discovery and the characterization of microbes in ancient environmental and human specimens expanded the knowledge about the evolution of microbiota and pathogens and rose new paradigms concerning the dynamics of deadly epidemics [1]. An expanding knowledge of the evolution of pathogens such as Yersinia pestis [6, 7], Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Mycobacterium leprae [8] and variola [9] helped reconstitute the dynamics of past devastating epidemics caused by these pathogens. These paleomicrobiological studies have been mainly based on the classical detection of DNA sequences by using targeted PCR-sequencing [10] 16S rRNA gene PCR-sequencing [11], 16S rRNA gene PCR-NGS [12] and DNA-array-based capture and NGS [7, 13]. Later studies culminated in the reconstitution of the complete genome of ancient strains of Y. pestis in Bronze Age individuals [6] and historical plague pandemic victims [7, 14, 15], Vibrio cholerae

Methods

Results

Conclusion