Geographically dispersed zoonotic tuberculosis in pre-contact South American human populations.

Previous ancient DNA research has shown that Mycobacterium pinnipedii, which today causes tuberculosis (TB) primarily in pinnipeds, infected human populations living in the coastal areas of Peru prior to European colonization. Skeletal evidence indicates the presence of TB in several pre-colonial South and North American populations with minimal access to marine resources- a scenario incompatible with TB transmission directly from infected pinnipeds or their tissues. In this study, we investigate the causative agent of TB in ten pre-colonial, non-coastal individuals from South America.

Two findings of gallstones in archaeological mummies from Colombia.

Results involving the analysis of gallstones found in two pre-Hispanic Colombian mummies are presented. By applying SEM, X-ray diffraction (XRD), sectioning, and CT-scan Hounsfield Units, we were able to identify these choleliths as mainly formed by cholesterol. The number of reports on gallstones in archaeological human remains from South America is very small, making these two cases an important addition to what little is known about ancient gallstone disease on the continent.

Hybridization screening of very short PCR products for paleoepidemiological studies of Chagas' disease.

Single strands of very short PCR products can be covalently immobilized to a slide and then easily detected by probe hybridization. In this work, the PCR product was a 70-nucleotide segment of ancient DNA, representing a portion of repeat mini-circle DNA from the kinetoplast of Trypanosoma cruzi, the infectious agent of Chagas' disease (American Trypanosomiasis). The target segment was initially established to be present in soft tissue samples taken from four "naturally" mummified Andean bodies using PCR followed by cloning and sequencing.

Isolation of Trypanosoma cruzi DNA in 4,000-year-old mummified human tissue from northern Chile.

A segment of DNA unique to the kinetoplast of Trypanosoma cruzi was isolated from spontaneously mummified human remains from the coastal area of northern Chile at sites dated from 2000 BC to about AD 1400. Following rehydration of the desiccated human tissue samples of heart, esophagus, or colon, the samples were extracted and primers employed to bind to a 330 bp kinetoplast minicircle DNA sequence present in T. cruzi.