Mammoth microbes revealed by paleogenomics

The last mammoths died out about four thousand years ago on Wrangel Island, 140 kilometers north of Russia's Far Eastern coast in the Chukotka region. Along with them, a trail of microbes, a tiny trace of which has just been found, a feat presented on September 2 in the journal Cell .

Benjamin Guinet (Center for Paleogenomics and Stockholm Natural History Museum) and his colleagues sifted through DNA taken from 483 mammoth samples, including some from a 1.1-million-year-old specimen. They were able to identify sequences attributed to six bacteria from the genera Actinobacillus , Pasteurella , Streptococcus , and Erysipelothrix . It should be noted that, to do this, they only manipulated genetic information, not the microbes themselves, which are long extinct.

"Microbial DNA is the nightmare of my paleogenetic colleagues who want to study mammoths, because it can resemble their genome," observes Benjamin Guinet. Their first instinct is therefore to get rid of it. He did the opposite: "I threw away all the data that resembled elephant DNA." The rest was subjected to a series of filters to eliminate contamination that occurred in the laboratory, but also sequences from plants, fungi, and microbes that could be found in the mammoths' environment, without being part of their microbiota.

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