EAGER: Identification of specific pathogens in human dental calculus

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Historical accounts show that infectious diseases have shaped human population history, but historical records are incomplete or non-existent for many past populations. Disease processes can also be studied in skeletons, but because not all diseases produce bony evidence, many infectious agents are effectively invisible in the archaeological record. This EAGER project will develop new protocols and best practices for recovering specific pathogen DNA from dental calculus, which is calcified plaque that often preserves on the teeth of skeletons. The investigators will use dental calculus samples from skeletons in the early 20th century Robert J. Terry Anatomical Collection who had clinical diagnoses of tuberculosis, syphilis, or pneumonia - all significant killers in the past. This method could potentially transform our understanding of disease experience in the past by expanding the suite of diseases that we can specifically identify in skeletal samples. This information will be of great importance in further understanding the effects of infectious disease on human population demographics and evolution. The protocols from this study will be disseminated in peer-reviewed scholarly publications, as well as highlighted in science education programming for broad and diverse audiences at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, Mississippi State's Lois Dowdle Cobb Archaeology Museum, and the Oklahoma Educators Evolve initiative. This project is jointly funded by NSF's Biological Anthropology program and the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).This project will develop and systematically test a novel method for pathogen detection in dental calculus. The investigators will analyze calculus samples (N=60) from Terry Collection individuals with ante-mortem, clinical diagnoses of infectious disease, using advanced techniques in targeted-genomics, metagenomics, and metaproteomics. Specific aims are to determine (1) whether pathogen biomolecules can be successfully identified from the dental calculus of individuals with known infectious diseases; (2) the sensitivity of these pathogen detection techniques; and (3) whether both active-at-death and resolved-at-death infections be detected in dental calculus. If successful, these tools would enable the identification and investigation of specific infectious diseases in human skeletal material, such as syphilis, tuberculosis, and pneumonia, which are otherwise not empirically identifiable with a high degree of certainty in the archaeological record.