Publication highlights

Researchers from the Crick and Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) have extracted and sequenced the oldest Egyptian DNA to date from an individual who lived around 4,500 to 4,800 years ago, the age of the first pyramids. The individual was buried in Nuwayrat, a village 265km south of Cairo, and had been buried in a ceramic pot in a tomb cut into the hillside. Most of his ancestry mapped to ancient individuals who lived in North Africa and the remaining 20% of his ancestry could be traced to ancient individuals who lived in the Fertile Crescent. This is genetic evidence that people moved into Egypt and mixed with local populations at this time, which was previously only visible in archaeological artefacts. Finally, the team used evidence from his skeleton to suggest he could have worked as a potter or in a trade requiring comparable movements.

Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute and UCL analysed the whole genome from four samples of B. recurrentis, a type of bacteria causing relapsing fever. Ranging from 2,300 to 600 years ago, their samples include the oldest B. recurrentis genome to date. The researchers looked at differences in the ancient genomes and modern-day B. recurrentis to map how the bacteria has changed over time, finding that the species likely diverged from its nearest tick-borne cousin, B. duttonii, about 6,000 to 4,000 years ago. They compared the B. recurrentis genomes with B. duttonii, finding that much of the genome was lost during the tick-to-louse transition but that new genes were also gained over time. These genetic changes affected the bacteria’s ability to hide from the immune system and also share DNA with neighbouring bacteria, suggesting B. recurrentis had specialised to survive within the human louse. This specialisation took place in a time of change in human lifestyles, as people began to domesticate animals, including sheep farming for wool, which may have been better for lice to lay eggs.

Waves of human migration across Europe during the first millennium AD have been revealed using a more precise method of analysing ancestry with ancient DNA, in research led by the Francis Crick Institute. The team report a new data analysis method called Twigstats, which allows the differences between genetically similar groups to be measured more precisely, revealing previously unknown details of migrations in Europe. They applied the new method to over 1500 European genomes (a person’s complete set of DNA) from people who lived primarily during the first millennium AD (year 1 to 1000), encompassing the Iron Age, the fall of the Roman Empire, the early medieval ‘Migration Period’ and the Viking Age.

Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute, working with UCL and Imperial College London, have discovered a new biological pathway that is a principal driver of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and related conditions, and which can be targeted using existing drugs. They found an enhancer in a 'gene desert', which was active in macrophages and boosted a gene called ETS2. This gene was essential for almost all inflammatory functions in macrophages, including several that directly contribute to tissue damage in IBD. The team then found that MEK inhibitors, drugs already prescribed from other non-inflammatory conditions, could reduce inflammation in macrophages and also gut samples from patients with IBD.

Researchers at the Crick, working with University of Oxford, University of York and Oxford Archaeology, have developed a new technique to measure the number of chromosomes in ancient genomes more precisely, using it to identify the first prehistoric person with mosaic Turner syndrome (characterised by one X chromosome instead of two [XX]), who lived about 2,500 years ago. They also identified the earliest known person with Jacob’s syndrome (characterised by an extra Y chromosome - XYY) in the Early Medieval Period, three people with Klinefelter syndrome (characterised by an extra X chromosome - XXY) across a range of time periods and an infant with Down Syndrome from the Iron Age. All were buried according to their society’s customs although no possessions were found with them to shed more light on their lives.