Stone Age Molecules Resurrected From Ancient Dental Plaque

Dental calculus preserves DNA over millennia, providing unprecedented information about the biodiversity and functional capabilities of ancient microbes. Credit: Werner Siemens Foundation, Felix Wey

Bioactive small molecules produced by microbes, often called natural products, have been an important source of diverse functional compounds for industry and medicine, including many antimicrobials. Characterizing the natural products encoded in biosynthetic gene clusters once produced by the microbiota of the ancient microbiome would provide valuable insight into previously unknown metabolites, as well as their role in the nutrition and health of early hominins.

Martin Klapper and colleagues searched for biosynthetic gene clusters in metagenomic datasets extracted from calcified dental plaque, or dental calculus, from ancient human and Neandertal remains spanning roughly the past 100,000 years.

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