Byzantine skeleton yields 800-year-old genomes from a fatal infection
Date:
January 10, 2017
Source:
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Summary:
New insight has been gained into the everyday hazards of life in the late Byzantine Empire, sometime around the early 13th century, as well as the evolution of Staphylococcus saprophyticus, a common bacterial pathogen.
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FULL STORY
The skeleton of a woman who died 800 years ago on the outskirts of the ancient city of Troy in modern Turkey has yielded the first record of maternal sepsis in the fossil record. DNA locked inside the calcified nodules, found at the base of the chest and extracted by researchers, yielded the complete genomes of the pathogenic bacteria likely responsible for the woman's death.
Credit: Gebhard Bieg
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170110120628.htm
