TY - JOUR
T1 - Complete mitochondrial genome sequencing of a burial from a Romano-Christian cemetery in the Dakhleh Oasis, Egypt
T2 - Preliminary indications
AU - Molto, J. Eldon
AU - Loreille, Odile
AU - Mallott, Elizabeth K.
AU - Malhi, Ripan S.
AU - Fast, Spence
AU - Daniels-Higginbotham, Jennifer
AU - Marshall, Charla
AU - Parr, Ryan
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgments: Above all we thank the Egyptian Ministry of State for Antiquities for their continued support of the Dakhleh Oasis Project (DOP). We also thank Anthony Mills for his dedication to the DOP and for making the field experience for the bioarchaeology team so rewarding. We especially thank Peter Sheldrick and the rest of the bioarchaeology team for their support. This research was supported by a SSHRC grant awarded to the senior author. We also want to thank Jeroen van der Perk and Philip Johnson for their help with MapDamage and ContamMix. Finally, we would like to thank Rebecca Just and the anonymous reviewers for their fruitful comments.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 by the authors.
PY - 2017/10/6
Y1 - 2017/10/6
N2 - The curse of ancient Egyptian DNA was lifted by a recent study which sequenced the mitochondrial genomes (mtGenome) of 90 ancient Egyptians from the archaeological site of Abusir el-Meleq. Surprisingly, these ancient inhabitants were more closely related to those from the Near East than to contemporary Egyptians. It has been accepted that the timeless highway of the Nile River seeded Egypt with African genetic influence, well before pre-Dynastic times. Here we report on the successful recovery and analysis of the complete mtGenome from a burial recovered from a remote Romano-Christian cemetery, Kellis 2 (K2). K2 serviced the ancient municipality of Kellis, a village located in the Dakhleh Oasis in the southwest desert in Egypt. The data were obtained by high throughput sequencing (HTS) performed independently at two ancient DNA facilities (Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, Dover, DE, USA and Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA). These efforts produced concordant haplotypes representing a U1a1a haplogroup lineage. This result indicates that Near Eastern maternal influence previously identified at Abusir el-Meleq was also present further south, in ancient Kellis during the Romano-Christian period.
AB - The curse of ancient Egyptian DNA was lifted by a recent study which sequenced the mitochondrial genomes (mtGenome) of 90 ancient Egyptians from the archaeological site of Abusir el-Meleq. Surprisingly, these ancient inhabitants were more closely related to those from the Near East than to contemporary Egyptians. It has been accepted that the timeless highway of the Nile River seeded Egypt with African genetic influence, well before pre-Dynastic times. Here we report on the successful recovery and analysis of the complete mtGenome from a burial recovered from a remote Romano-Christian cemetery, Kellis 2 (K2). K2 serviced the ancient municipality of Kellis, a village located in the Dakhleh Oasis in the southwest desert in Egypt. The data were obtained by high throughput sequencing (HTS) performed independently at two ancient DNA facilities (Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, Dover, DE, USA and Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA). These efforts produced concordant haplotypes representing a U1a1a haplogroup lineage. This result indicates that Near Eastern maternal influence previously identified at Abusir el-Meleq was also present further south, in ancient Kellis during the Romano-Christian period.
KW - Ancient DNA
KW - Dakhleh Oasis
KW - Egypt
KW - High throughput sequencing
KW - Mitochondrial genome
KW - U1a1a haplogroup
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85031310359&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3390/genes8100262
DO - 10.3390/genes8100262
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85031310359
SN - 2073-4425
VL - 8
JO - Genes
JF - Genes
IS - 10
M1 - 262
ER -