Recovery of a medieval Brucella melitensis genome using shotgun metagenomics

Kay, Gemma L., Sergeant, Martin J., Giuffra, Valentina, Bandiera, Pasquale, Milanese, Marco, Bramanti, Barbara, Bianucci, Raffaella and Pallen, Mark J. (2014) Recovery of a medieval Brucella melitensis genome using shotgun metagenomics. mBIO, 5 (4). ISSN 2150-7511

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Abstract

Shotgun metagenomics provides a powerful assumption-free approach to the recovery of pathogen genomes from contemporary and historical material. We sequenced the metagenome of a calcified nodule from the skeleton of a 14th-century middle-aged male excavated from the medieval Sardinian settlement of Geridu. We obtained 6.5-fold coverage of a Brucella melitensis genome. Sequence reads from this genome showed signatures typical of ancient or aged DNA. Despite the relatively low coverage, we were able to use information from single-nucleotide polymorphisms to place the medieval pathogen genome within a clade of B. melitensis strains that included the well-studied Ether strain and two other recent Italian isolates. We confirmed this placement using information from deletions and IS711 insertions. We conclude that metagenomics stands ready to document past and present infections, shedding light on the emergence, evolution, and spread of microbial pathogens.  IMPORTANCE Infectious diseases have shaped human populations and societies throughout history. The recovery of pathogen DNA sequences from human remains provides an opportunity to identify and characterize the causes of individual and epidemic infections. By sequencing DNA extracted from medieval human remains through shotgun metagenomics, without target-specific capture or amplification, we have obtained a draft genome sequence of an similar to 700-year-old Brucella melitensis strain. Using a variety of bioinformatic approaches, we have shown that this historical strain is most closely related to recent strains isolated from Italy, confirming the continuity of this zoonotic infection, and even a specific lineage, in the Mediterranean region over the centuries.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Copyright © 2014 Kay et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license, which permits unrestricted noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	sdg 3 - good health and well-being ,/dk/atira/pure/sustainabledevelopmentgoals/good_health_and_well_being
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Norwich Medical School
Depositing User:	Pure Connector
Date Deposited:	24 Sep 2016 00:47
Last Modified:	24 May 2023 14:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/60218
DOI:	10.1128/mBio.01337-14

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