In addition to the rich finds in the ruins of the Roman city of Pompeii, there is now another source of information. For the first time, experts have succeeded in extracting and successfully sequencing evaluable amounts of genetic material from the remains of a victim of the Vesuvius eruption in 79 AD. As the team around Gabriele Scorrano from the University of Tor Vergata in Rome reports, the deceased was probably a local. For the study now published in »Scientific Reports«, the working group compared his genome with 1030 ancient and 471 modern genomes. The analysis suggests that the DNA has most in common with modern Italians as well as the inhabitants of central Italy during the Roman Imperial period, the team writes.
The genetic material comes from one of the two skeletons examined in the study, which came from the “Casa del Fabbro” – “House of the Blacksmith” – which was excavated between 1914 and 1933. Only from one of them, the remains of a 35 to 40-year-old man, did the working group obtain genetic material covering around 40 percent of the total length of the genome. The other skeleton, that of a woman over 50 years old, provided only a good tenth of a percent of the entire genome, too little for an analysis.
The main result of the study is that such analyzes are possible – and should also be carried out on other skeletons. The findings provided a basis for reconstructing the genetic history of the population of Pompeii, the team writes. In addition, the result points to a high level of genetic diversity in Roman Italy, because the genome also contains genes that are almost exclusively found on the island of Sardinia, and a main component analysis of the genome also indicates gene flow from Asia Minor.
In addition, not all of the analyzed genome came from the volcano victim himself, as it turned out. Damage to the spine of the skeleton had already indicated that a pathogen had invaded the bone – with a high probability, the experts concluded, the individual had bone tuberculosis. In fact, Scorrano’s team isolated about 14,000 base pairs belonging to the genus Mycobacterium assigned, which also includes the causative agent of tuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosisheard.