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 led by 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 genetic material 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 come from the "Casa del Fabbro" - "House of the Schmied" - "House of the Schmied". Only from one of them, the remains of an approximately 35 to 40 -year -old man, won the genetic material of around 40 percent of the total length of the genome. The other skeleton, that of a woman over 50 years old,, on the other hand, provided too little for an analysis.
The main result of the study is that such analyses are possible – and they should also be done on other skeletons. The findings opened a basis for reconstructing the genetic history of the population of Pompeii, the team writes. In addition, the result indicates a high genetic diversity in Roman Italy, because the genetic material also contains genes that occur almost exclusively on the island of Sardinia, and a main component analysis of the genome also indicates gene flow from Asia Minor.
In addition, the entire analyzed genetic material does not come from the volcanic sacrifice himself, as it turned out. Damage to the spine of the skeleton had already indicated that a pathogens had affected the bone - with high probability, according to the experts, the individual had bone tuberculosis. In fact, the team led by Scorrano isolated around 14,000 pairs of base that could be assigned to the genus Mycobacterium, which also includes the pathogen of tuberculosis, mycobacterium tuberculosis.
