Publications

McMaster Ancient DNA Centre research on the use of quantitative PCR to predict hybridization capture success.

McMaster Ancient DNA researchers and collaborators identified Yersinia pestis as the causative agent behind the Plague of Justinian. Notably, the the Justinian strain is unique from strains in later pandemics and has either gone extinct or remains unsampled in wild rodent reservoirs.

Research paper on the identification and retrieval of Vibrio cholerae from preserved intestines of a victim of the 1849 cholera outbreak in Philadelphia, part of the second cholera pandemic.

This paper reports the first complete genome of the causitive agent behind the Black Death, Yersinia pestis. Notably it also shows that modern Yersinia pestis strains have stem from these medieval lineages and suggest that factors other than bacterial phenotype may have played a large role in the increased virulance of the Black Death strain.

This work illustrates that antibiotic resistance is a naturally occurring, widespread phenomenon that predates our extensive use of antibiotics. This is consistent with the rapid rise of antibiotic resistance in clinical settings which likely build on establish antibiotic resistance genes in their environments.

Here we report the entire full pPCP1 virulence-associated plasmid of Yersinia pestis as high coverage, the longest contingous genomic sequence of an ancient pathogen to date. Further analysis shows that this plasmid belongs to a Y. pestis strain that has not been previously reported and as such is likely not responsible for modern forms of the disease.

Here we report the first complete mitochondrial genomes of a Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) and a North American Woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius). Evolutionary analysis shows that the Columbian mammoth sample sits within a subclade of North Americna Woolly mammoths, suggesting that the two species likely interbred at some point their evolutionary histories.

Here we report a systematic comparison of 11 commercially available reverse transciptases for cDNA synthesis. Our analysis reveals significant variation in the sesntivity of these enzymes with Accuscript and Superscript III ranking as the most sensitive and consistent between replicates.

Here we report a systematic comparison of formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded tissue kits for RNA and DNA extraction. Overall, TrimGen's WaxFree and phenol-chloroform methods recovered the largest DNA yields, while Ambion's RecoverAll kit recovered the largest quantity of amplifiable RNA.