Abstract
Santiago-Rodriguez et al. [1] report on the putative gut microbiome and resistome of Inca and Italian mummies, and find that Italian mummies exhibit higher bacterial diversity compared to the Inca mummies.[...].
Highlights
Santiago-Rodriguez et al [1] report on the putative gut microbiome and resistome of Inca and Italian mummies, and find that Italian mummies exhibit higher bacterial diversity compared to the Inca mummies
We explored the taxa present within their blank control (Supplementary_Dataset_2.txt from their publication) and compared it to those identified within the mummies
We found that laboratory contaminants present within their blank control are driving the differences between Incan and Italian mummies (Figure 1)
Summary
Received: 31 January 2018; Accepted: 19 February 2018; Published: 26 February 2018. Santiago-Rodriguez et al [1] report on the putative gut microbiome and resistome of Inca and Italian mummies, and find that Italian mummies exhibit higher bacterial diversity compared to the Inca mummies. Contaminant taxa in their negative control account for most of the biological signal observed They fail to properly apply field-standard ancient DNA authentication techniques to their data and self-plagiarize a previously published figure. Explicit rules and standards to avoid falsely reporting contaminants in metagenomics datasets have been put forth [3,4,6,7,8,17] These standards typically include sampling and extraction blank controls (e.g., tubes processed without the addition of biological samples) to monitor contaminant DNA and correctly attribute its contribution in subsequent analyses. This strongly suggests that the cultural differences reported by the authors are likely the result of laboratory contamination and calls into question the validity of their subsequent analyses
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