Bacterial DNA in 13th-century Troy bones provides snapshot of maternal infection
TORONTO — It’s not the legendary Troy of Agamemnon and Paris, but the site of the ancient city is still giving up secrets to disease detectives who study the evolution of bacteria and other microbes that continue to cause illness in humans today.
An international team of scientists, including experts at McMaster University in Hamilton, have sequenced the genomes of two types of bacteria, whose DNA was preserved in calcified placental abscesses found in the skeleton of a woman who died in Byzantine Troy about 800 years ago.
The 30-year-old woman had been pregnant — researchers were able to extract the woman’s DNA and that of her male fetus — and had likely died of a urogenital infection caused by one or both of the bacteria, Gardnerella vaginalis and Staphylococcus saprophyticus, which cause genital and urinary tract infections in women to this day.
Her skeleton was unearthed by archeologists in a 13th-century graveyard on the outskirts of Troy, site of the fabled walled city besieged by Greek forces in Homer’s “Illiad,” located in what is now Anatolia in Turkey.