| Literature DB >> 29745896 |
Ben Krause-Kyora1,2, Julian Susat1, Felix M Key2, Denise Kühnert2,3, Esther Bosse1,4, Alexander Immel1,2, Christoph Rinne5, Sabin-Christin Kornell1, Diego Yepes4, Sören Franzenburg1, Henrike O Heyne6,7,8, Thomas Meier9,10, Sandra Lösch11, Harald Meller12, Susanne Friederich12, Nicole Nicklisch12,13, Kurt W Alt12,13,14,15, Stefan Schreiber1,16, Andreas Tholey4, Alexander Herbig2, Almut Nebel1, Johannes Krause2.
Abstract
The hepatitis B virus (HBV) is one of the most widespread human pathogens known today, yet its origin and evolutionary history are still unclear and controversial. Here, we report the analysis of three ancient HBV genomes recovered from human skeletons found at three different archaeological sites in Germany. We reconstructed two Neolithic and one medieval HBV genome by de novo assembly from shotgun DNA sequencing data. Additionally, we observed HBV-specific peptides using paleo-proteomics. Our results demonstrated that HBV has circulated in the European population for at least 7000 years. The Neolithic HBV genomes show a high genomic similarity to each other. In a phylogenetic network, they do not group with any human-associated HBV genome and are most closely related to those infecting African non-human primates. The ancient viruses appear to represent distinct lineages that have no close relatives today and possibly went extinct. Our results reveal the great potential of ancient DNA from human skeletons in order to study the long-time evolution of blood borne viruses.Entities:
Keywords: ancient DNA; ancient pathogens; genetics; genomics; hepatitis B; human evolution; infectious disease; microbiology; next generation sequencing; virus evolution
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Year: 2018 PMID： 29745896 PMCID： PMC6008052 DOI： 10.7554/eLife.36666
Source DB: PubMed Journal: Elife ISSN： 2050-084X Impact factor: 8.140