Abstract
Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of plague, ravaged humankind with three historically documented pandemics. Paleogenetic analysis of human skeletons additionally show the presence of Y. pestis in prehistory as early as the Neolithic period. These findings, however, have so far been geographically limited to Eurasia.
Here, we report the presence of Y. pestis DNA in an ancient Egyptian mummy (Suppl. 05066) of an adult male from the collection of the Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy. The individual, who was anthropogenically mummified, was radiocarbon-dated from the end of the Second Intermediate Period to the beginning of the New Kingdom (3290 ± 45 years BP; 1686-1449 cal. BC), yet its exact provenance within Egypt is unknown. Bone tissue and intestinal content derived from the mummy were first subjected to a shotgun metagenomics approach. Thereby, we detected Y. pestis DNA in both samples indicating broad tissue tropism of the pathogen during an already advanced state of disease progression. The samples have been further processed using a targeted enrichment approach that resulted in low coverage genome-wide data of both the human host and the Y. pestis pathogen.
This is the first reported prehistoric Y. pestis genome outside Eurasia providing molecular evidence for the presence of plague in ancient Egypt, although we cannot infer how widespread the disease was during this time. The obtained genomic data is further analysed to assign the ancient strain to the currently known Y. pestis diversity, to study virulence-associated genes, and to characterize its possible modes of transmission and pathology.