Scientists pull new molecules from old teeth

Abstract

A group of researchers has synthesized a never-before-seen natural product found by scraping crusted gunk from Neanderthal teeth. An international team led by Pierre Stallforth from the Hans Knöll Institute and Christina Warinner of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology mined calcified dental plaque for DNA fragments, pieced these bits together to reconstruct ancient bacterial genes, and then synthesized a pair of small molecules called paleofurans ( Science 2023, DOI: 10.1126/science.adf5300 ). This is the first time scientists have reassembled and then used ancient DNA as a blueprint to synthesize natural products. The method not only shows how bacteria swam through Paleolithic mouths but also opens up the search for potentially useful natural products to billions of years of history. Natural products are potential sources of new antibiotics and other drugs. But scientists have been limited to searching sources living in the current time. “We’re adding a time dimension