Ancient host-associated microbes obtained from mammoth remains

作者：Benjamin Guinet, Nikolay Oskolkov, Kelsey Moreland, Marianne Dehasque, J. Camilo Chacón‐Duque, Anders Angerbjörn, Juan Luís Arsuaga, Gleb K. Danilov, Foteini Kanellidou, Andrew C. Kitchener, Héloïse Muller, Valerii Plotnikov, А. В. Протопопов, Alexei Tikhonov, Laura Termes, Grant D. Zazula, Peter Mortensen, L. V. Grigorieva, Michael P. Richards, Beth Shapiro, Adrian M. Lister, Sergey Vartanyan, David Díez‐del‐Molino, Anders Götherström, Patrícia Pečnerová, Pavel A. Nikolskiy, Love Dalén, Tom van der Valk · 发表于：Cell · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1016/j.cell.2025.08.003 · 被引用次数：4 · 研究领域：Microbial infections and disease research、Rabies epidemiology and control、Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies

Ancient genomic studies have extensively explored human-microbial interactions, yet research on non-human animals remains limited. In this study, we analyzed ancient microbial DNA from 483 mammoth remains spanning over 1 million years, including 440 newly sequenced and unpublished samples from a 1.1-million-year-old steppe mammoth. Using metagenomic screening, contaminant filtering, damage pattern analysis, and phylogenetic inference, we identified 310 microbes associated with different mammoth tissues. While most microbes were environmental or post-mortem colonizers, we recovered genomic evidence of six host-associated microbial clades spanning Actinobacillus, Pasteurella, Streptococcus, and Erysipelothrix. Some of these clades contained putative virulence factors, including a Pasteurella-related bacterium that had previously been linked to the deaths of African elephants. Notably, we reconstructed partial genomes of Erysipelothrix from the oldest mammoth sample, representing the oldest authenticated host-associated microbial DNA to date. This work demonstrates the potential of obtaining ancient animal microbiomes, which can inform further paleoecological and evolutionary research.