Enlarge / This is not how a healthy lumbar vertebra should look like.
Scorrano et al. 2022
The eruption of Vesuvius buried the Roman city of Pompeii in ashes in 79 AD. Anthropologists recently sequenced ancient DNA from one of the victims, a man in his late 30s, looking at the family background of a Roman citizen.
The results also suggest that he suffered from a tuberculosis infection in the lower spine. In one of the victim’s vertebrae, the study found DNA from the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, which suggests that the infection passed through the bloodstream from his lungs to the lower spine.
The man from Pompeii was Italian
A team led by anthropologist Gabriele Scorrano of the University of Rome sequenced the victim’s genome, revealing, not surprisingly, that the man was of Central Italian descent. Although the genome of ancient man did not provide much new information about life in Pompeii, it proves that the bones of Pompeii may still contain enough DNA for sequencing – and this may be exciting news.
Even the partial genomes of a few other Pompeians could shed some light on the demographics of a cosmopolitan Roman city, where historical documents tell us that people came from all over the Roman Empire (free or not). But sequencing ancient DNA from skeletons in Pompeii is challenging because high temperatures – such as those in the pyroclastic flow of overheated volcanic gas and debris that killed everyone in the city – tend to cause chemical changes in the bones and damage DNA inside. Previous studies have succeeded in sequencing only a few short sections of mitochondrial DNA (which is stored in the famous meme “cell power plant” and transmitted directly from mother to child).
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Recently, his colleagues say that advances in technology have made it possible to obtain DNA from sources that would have been unusable several years ago. And they claim in a recent document that the volcanic ash and rock that buried Pompeii may also have protected the remains of things like oxygen, which can also break down DNA. In other words, sequencing an ancient genome from Pompeii worked once, and that means it can work again.
Diagnosis: Tuberculosis
Skorrano suspects that the man may have spinal tuberculosis based on the condition of his fourth lumbar vertebra (L4), one of the bones in the lower spine. An infection has eaten a hole in the upper front of the bone, and the surrounding bone has been severely carved and eroded. In a vertebral bone sample, Scorrano and his colleagues found genetic material from Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. This confirmed the diagnosis and suggested some details about what the man’s life might have been like before the eruption of Vesuvius.
Ancient Rome was an outbreak of tuberculosis, mainly due to overcrowding in most Roman cities. Tuberculosis is usually a lung disease, but sometimes bacteria from the lungs can travel through the bloodstream to other parts of the body, including the bones. In your vertebrae and in the long bones of your arms and legs, dense networks of blood vessels supply blood to the bone marrow. If you happen to have tuberculosis, these blood vessels can also carry bacteria to the bone.
And 2,000 years later, archaeologists may have been able to sequence DNA from these bacteria and find that you had tuberculosis on your spine until a volcano buried your city in ash and pumice. Some people are really terribly lucky.
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