Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany.
Institute for Archaeological Sciences, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
Nat Ecol Evol. 2018 Mar;2(3):520-528. doi: 10.1038/s41559-017-0446-6. Epub 2018 Jan 15.
Indigenous populations of the Americas experienced high mortality rates during the early contact period as a result of infectious diseases, many of which were introduced by Europeans. Most of the pathogenic agents that caused these outbreaks remain unknown. Through the introduction of a new metagenomic analysis tool called MALT, applied here to search for traces of ancient pathogen DNA, we were able to identify Salmonella enterica in individuals buried in an early contact era epidemic cemetery at Teposcolula-Yucundaa, Oaxaca in southern Mexico. This cemetery is linked, based on historical and archaeological evidence, to the 1545-1550 CE epidemic that affected large parts of Mexico. Locally, this epidemic was known as 'cocoliztli', the pathogenic cause of which has been debated for more than a century. Here, we present genome-wide data from ten individuals for Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serovar Paratyphi C, a bacterial cause of enteric fever. We propose that S. Paratyphi C be considered a strong candidate for the epidemic population decline during the 1545 cocoliztli outbreak at Teposcolula-Yucundaa.
美洲原住民在早期接触时期由于传染病而死亡率很高，其中许多疾病是由欧洲人引入的。导致这些疫情爆发的大多数病原体仍然未知。通过引入一种名为 MALT 的新宏基因组分析工具，我们在这里应用它来寻找古代病原体 DNA 的痕迹，我们能够在墨西哥南部奥萨卡州的特波斯科鲁拉-尤昆达的一个早期接触时代流行墓地中发现沙门氏菌。根据历史和考古证据，这个墓地与 1545-1550 年 CE 年间影响墨西哥大部分地区的疫情有关。在当地，这种疫情被称为“cocoliztli”，其致病原因已经争论了一个多世纪。在这里，我们从十个个体中提供了沙门氏菌肠亚种肠炎血清型 C 的全基因组数据，这是一种肠道发热的细菌病因。我们提出，S. Paratyphi C 应该被认为是 1545 年特波斯科鲁拉-尤昆达 cocoliztli 疫情期间流行人群减少的一个强有力的候选者。
