Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
Curr Biol. 2021 Aug 23;31(16):3564-3574.e9. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2021.06.023. Epub 2021 Jul 12.
Cave sediments have been shown to preserve ancient DNA but so far have not yielded the genome-scale information of skeletal remains. We retrieved and analyzed human and mammalian nuclear and mitochondrial environmental "shotgun" genomes from a single 25,000-year-old Upper Paleolithic sediment sample from Satsurblia cave, western Georgia:first, a human environmental genome with substantial basal Eurasian ancestry, which was an ancestral component of the majority of post-Ice Age people in the Near East, North Africa, and parts of Europe; second, a wolf environmental genome that is basal to extant Eurasian wolves and dogs and represents a previously unknown, likely extinct, Caucasian lineage; and third, a European bison environmental genome that is basal to present-day populations, suggesting that population structure has been substantially reshaped since the Last Glacial Maximum. Our results provide new insights into the Late Pleistocene genetic histories of these three species and demonstrate that direct shotgun sequencing of sediment DNA, without target enrichment methods, can yield genome-wide data informative of ancestry and phylogenetic relationships.
洞穴沉积物已被证明可以保存古代 DNA，但迄今为止尚未从格鲁吉亚西部 Satsurblia 洞穴的单个 25000 年前旧石器时代沉积物样本中获得骨骼遗骸的基因组规模信息。我们从该样本中提取并分析了人类和哺乳动物核和线粒体环境“ shotgun”基因组：首先，一个具有大量欧亚大陆祖先的人类环境基因组，它是冰河时代后期近东、北非和欧洲部分地区大多数人的祖先组成部分；其次，一个狼的环境基因组，它是现存欧亚狼和狗的基础，代表了一个以前未知的、可能已经灭绝的高加索谱系；最后，一个欧洲野牛的环境基因组，它是现存种群的基础，这表明自末次冰盛期以来，种群结构已经发生了巨大变化。我们的研究结果为这三个物种的晚更新世遗传历史提供了新的见解，并证明了无需目标富集方法的直接沉积物 DNA shotgun 测序可以产生有关祖先和系统发育关系的全基因组数据。
