PLoS Pathogens (Sep 2021)

A 3,000-year-old, basal S. enterica lineage from Bronze Age Xinjiang suggests spread along the Proto-Silk Road.

  • Xiyan Wu,
  • Chao Ning,
  • Felix M Key,
  • Aida Andrades Valtueña,
  • Aditya Kumar Lankapalli,
  • Shizhu Gao,
  • Xuan Yang,
  • Fan Zhang,
  • Linlin Liu,
  • Zhongzhi Nie,
  • Jian Ma,
  • Johannes Krause,
  • Alexander Herbig,
  • Yinqiu Cui

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1009886
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 17, no. 9
p. e1009886

Abstract

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Salmonella enterica (S. enterica) has infected humans for a long time, but its evolutionary history and geographic spread across Eurasia is still poorly understood. Here, we screened for pathogen DNA in 14 ancient individuals from the Bronze Age Quanergou cemetery (XBQ), Xinjiang, China. In 6 individuals we detected S. enterica. We reconstructed S. enterica genomes from those individuals, which form a previously undetected phylogenetic branch basal to Paratyphi C, Typhisuis and Choleraesuis-the so-called Para C lineage. Based on pseudogene frequency, our analysis suggests that the ancient S. enterica strains were not host adapted. One genome, however, harbors the Salmonella pathogenicity island 7 (SPI-7), which is thought to be involved in (para)typhoid disease in humans. This offers first evidence that SPI-7 was acquired prior to the emergence of human-adapted Paratyphi C around 1,000 years ago. Altogether, our results show that Salmonella enterica infected humans in Eastern Eurasia at least 3,000 years ago, and provide the first ancient DNA evidence for the spread of a pathogen along the Proto-Silk Road.