An ancient view on host pathogen interaction across time and space

Abstract

The ancient DNA revolution provided diverse fields with an unprecedented opportunity to look back into the past and shed light on research aspects that were until now subject to speculation and inference from modern data. In particular enrichment methods that allow the targeted retrieval of millions of SNP positions from ancient human genomes, or even complete bacterial and viral genomes have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of host pathogen interactions. Ancient DNA combined with new bioinformatic tools now even allows actual allele calling for immunogenetic systems such as Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) across time and space. The coming years will provide us with frequency data of human immunity genes, such as HLA, as well as genome wide data of ancient pathogens from many time periods of human history, and will therefore provide us with a dynamic view on historical human adaptation to pathogen exposure on a population wide scale.