University of Tübingen scientists reconstructed medieval leprosy genomes to shed light on disease’s history

27-6-2013 — /europawire.eu/ — An international team of scientists reconstructed a dozen medieval and modern leprosy genomes – suggesting a European origin for the North American leprosy strains found in armadillos and humans, and a common ancestor of all leprosy bacteria within the last 4000 years.

It is the first time scientists have reconstructed an ancient genome without a reference sequence (de novo) due to the extraordinary preservation of the medieval pathogen’s DNA. This finding indicates that ancient bacterial DNA may survive in some cases much beyond the one million year boundary suggested for vertebrate DNA.

Leprosy, a devastating chronic disease caused by the bacterial pathogen Mycobacterium leprae, was prevalent in Europe until the late Middle
Ages. Today, the disease is found in 91 countries worldwide with about 200,000 new infections reported annually.

To retrace the history of the disease, an international team of scientists, led by Johannes Krause from Tübingen and Stewart Cole from EPFL Lausanne, have reconstructed entire genome sequences of M. leprae bacteria from five medieval skeletons that were excavated in Denmark, Sweden and the United Kingdom as well as seven biopsy samples from modern patients.

The researchers compared the medieval European M. leprae genomes with 11 worldwide modern strains, including the seven biopsy strains, revealing that all M. leprae strains share a common ancestor that existed within the last 4000 years. This is congruent with the earliest osteological evidence for the disease in the archaeological records dated to 2000 BC from India. The genome comparisons indicate a remarkable genomic conservation of the bacteria during the past 1,000 years. The team of scientists could furthermore show that M. leprae genotypes in medieval Europe are today found in the Middle East, whereas other medieval strains show a striking similarity to modern strains found today in North American armadillos and leprosy patients suggesting a European origin of leprosy in the Americas.

One skeleton from Denmark (Jorgen 625) showed extraordinary preservation of the pathogen DNA, allowing a genome reconstruction without using a modern refer-ence sequence, which was never done before for an ancient organism’s genome. The scientists found that almost half of the DNA recovered from that particular specimen derived from M. leprae bacteria; this is orders of magnitude higher than the amount of pathogen DNA usually observed in skeletons and modern patients. They furthermore found that the M. leprae DNA was far better preserved compared to the human DNA, which may explain this unusually high amounts of bacterial DNA in these skeleton samples. According to the authors this may be due to the extremely thick and impervious waxy cell wall of the leprosy bacillus that protects their DNA from degradation. Therefore, the authors speculate that some bacterial DNA may be preserved much longer than any vertebrate DNA, which is usually less protected. “This opens the possibility that certain types of bacterial DNA may survive well beyond the maximum age for mammalian DNA of around one million years,” says Krause and adds, “This gives us a real perspective to trace back the pre-historic origins of a disease.”

Source: Verena J. Schuenemann et al. 2013. „Genome-wide comparison of medieval and modern Mycobacterium leprae”, Science, in press, 1238286

More photos at: http://www.eurekalert.org/jrnls/sci/

Contacts:

Johannes Krause
University of Tübingen
Institute for Archaeological Sciences
Rümelinstr. 23 • 72070 Tübingen
Germany
Phone: +49 7071 29-74089
Johannes.krause[at]tuebingen.de

Kay Nieselt
University of Tübingen
Center for Bioinformatics Tübingen
Sand 14, 72076 Tübingen
Germany
Phone: +49(0)7071 / 29-78981
kay.nieselt[at]tuebingen.de

Stewart Cole
EPFL/SV/GHI/UPCOL
Station 19,
CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
Tel: +41 21 693 18 51
stewart.cole[at].ch

The following authors contributed to the publication:
Verena J. Schuenemann, Günter Jäger, Kirsten I. Bos, Alexander Herbig, Peter Bauer, Kay Nieselt und Johannes Krause von der Universität Tübingen (Deutschland); Pushpendra Singh, Andrej Benjak, Philippe Busso und Stewart T. Cole von der Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Schweiz); Thomas A. Mendum, Huihai Wu, Graham R. Stewart and G. Michael Taylor von der Universität Surrey (Großbritannien); Ben Krause-Kyora und Almut Nebel von der Universität Kiel (Deutschland); Christos Economou und Anna Kjellström von Universität Stockholm (Schweden); Jesper L. Boldsen von der Medicine University of Southern Denmark (Dänemark); Oona Y.-C. Lee, Houdini H.T. Wu, David E. Minnikin and Gurdyal S. Besra von der Universität Birmingham (Großbritannien); Katie Tucker und Simon Roffey von der Universität Winchester (Großbritannien); Samba O. Sow vom Zentrum für Impfstoff Entwicklung-Mali (Mali).

The study was funded by :
the European Research Council (ERC-APGREID), the Carl Zeiss Foundation, the Fondation Raoul Follereau, the Swiss National Science Foundation (Brazilian Swiss Joint Research Program), the Medical Faculty of the Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel, a British Academy Small Research Grant, the Leverhulme Trust (Grant F/00094/BL) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (postdoctoral fellowship grant 756-2011-0501).

Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen
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