Neolithic and Medieval virus genomes reveal complex evolution of Hepatitis B
- Kiel University, Germany
- Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Germany
- University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland
- Broad Institute, United States
- Heidelberg University, Germany
- University of Bern, Switzerland
- State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt and State Museum of Prehistory, Germany
Abstract
The hepatitis B virus (HBV) is one of the most widespread human pathogens known today, yet its origin and evolutionary history are still unclear and controversial. Here, we report the analysis of three ancient HBV genomes recovered from human skeletons found at three different archaeological sites in Germany. We reconstructed two Neolithic and one medieval HBV genomes by de novo assembly from shotgun DNA sequencing data. Additionally, we observed HBV-specific peptides using paleo-proteomics. Our results show that HBV circulates in the European population for at least 7000 years. The Neolithic HBV genomes show a high genomic similarity to each other. In a phylogenetic network, they do not group with any human-associated HBV genome and are most closely related to those infecting African non-human primates. These ancient virus forms appear to represent distinct lineages that have no close relatives today and possibly went extinct. Our results reveal the great potential of ancient DNA from human skeletons in order to study the long-time evolution of blood borne viruses.
Data availability
Raw sequence read files have been deposited at the European Nucleotide Archive under accession no. PRJEB24921
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
European Research Council (APGREID)
- Johannes Krause
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Al 287-7-1)
- Kurt W Alt
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Me 3245/1-1)
- Harald Meller
Collaborative Research Center (1266)
- Ben Krause-Kyora
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: Our human remains used are prehistoric European specimens. No consent from them can be required. No decedent groups claim responsibility or ancestry to those people.
Copyright
© 2018, Krause-Kyora et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Neolithic and Medieval virus genomes reveal complex evolution of Hepatitis B
eLife 7:e36666.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.36666
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