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Study Abstract
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This study will reconstruct the diversity and relative abundance of infectious pathogens in late 18th century-early 19th century skeletons through metgeonomic analysis of archaeological dental calculus . The focus is Industrial England, which witnessed unprecedented urban growth, and where records indicate differential mortality from tuberculosis, typhus (1818) and cholera (1831-2) among urban poor. DNA will be extracted within a dedicated clean-room facility using a protocol based on Dabney et al. (2013), doi: 10.1073/pnas.1314445110. We will apply a ‘shotgun’ metagenomic approach to simultaneously amplify all DNA trapped in the tartar (viruses, bacteria, fungi), and screen the sequences against reference databases to identify opportunistic, systemic and oral pathogens in each skeleton. We will examine differences in pathogen diversity and abundance and explore the congruence of microbial, skeletal and historical evidence for infectious disease exposure in urban and rural centres. This data is part of a pre-publication release. For information on the proper use of pre-publication data shared by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (including details of any publication moratoria), please see http://www.sanger.ac.uk/datasharing/
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