ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2015
Screening ancient tuberculosis with qPCR: challenges and opportunities.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- A minimal hybridization capture approach for the parallel enrichment and cost-effective detection of ancient human pathogens.iScience · 2026Article
- Metagenomic and paleopathological analyses of a historic documented collection explore ancient dental calculus as a diagnostic tool.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The Evolution of Diagnostic Techniques in the Paleopathology of Tuberculosis: A Scoping Review.Pathogens & immunity · 2023Article
- Geographically dispersed zoonotic tuberculosis in pre-contact South American human populations.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Article
- Screening methods for detection of ancient Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex fingerprints in next-generation sequencing data derived from skeletal samples.GigaScience · 2019Article
- Ancient pathogen genomics as an emerging tool for infectious disease research.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2019Review
- Mycobacterium leprae genomes from naturally infected nonhuman primates.PLoS neglected tropical diseases · 2018Article
- Validation of qPCR Methods for the Detection of Mycobacterium in New World Animal Reservoirs.PLoS neglected tropical diseases · 2015Article
- Introduction. Ancient DNA: the first three decades.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The field of ancient DNA (aDNA) has rapidly accelerated in recent years as a result of new methods in next-generation sequencing, library preparation and targeted enrichment. Such research is restricted, however, by the highly variable DNA preservation within different tissues, especially when isolating ancient pathogens from human remains. Identifying positive candidate samples via quantitative PCR (qPCR) for downstream procedures can reduce reagent costs, increase capture efficiency and maximize the number of sequencing reads of the target. This study uses four qPCR assays designed to target regions within the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) to examine 133 human skeletal samples from a wide geographical and temporal range, identified by the presence of skeletal lesions typical of chronic disseminated tuberculosis. Given the inherent challenges working with ancient mycobacteria, strict criteria must be used and primer/probe design continually re-evaluated as new data from bacteria become available. Seven samples tested positive for multiple MTBC loci, supporting them as strong candidates for downstream analyses. Using strict and conservative criteria, qPCR remains a fast and effective screening tool when compared with screening by more expensive sequencing and enrichment technologies.
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