ArticlePLoS pathogens2021
A 3,000-year-old, basal S. enterica lineage from Bronze Age Xinjiang suggests spread along the Proto-Silk Road.
Article in PLoS pathogens, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Probing the zooarchaeological record across time and space for ancient pathogen DNA.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Recent Microbial Evolutionary Insights From Metagenomics.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Review
- Ancient DNA insights into diverse pathogens and their hosts.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2026Review
- Origin and dispersal history of Hepatitis B virus in Eastern Eurasia.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Historic and Prehistoric Epidemics: An Overview of Sources Available for the Study of Ancient Pathogens.Epidemiologia (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
- A 16Communications biology · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
14 authors.
Funding
Abstract
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.
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