Isabelle Glocke

Several disease-causing bacteria have transitioned from tick-borne to louse-borne transmission, a process associated with increased virulence and genome reduction. However, the historical time frame and speed of such evolutionary transitions have not been documented with ancient genomes. Here, we discover four ancient cases of Borrelia recurrentis,...

Ancient DNA is a valuable tool for investigating genetic and evolutionary history that can also provide detailed profiles of the lives of ancient individuals. In this study, we develop a generalised computational approach to detect aneuploidies (atypical autosomal and sex chromosome karyotypes) in the ancient genetic record and distinguish such kar...

Extinct lineages of Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of the plague, have been identified in several individuals from Eurasia between 5000 and 2500 years before present (BP). One of these, termed the ‘LNBA lineage’ (Late Neolithic and Bronze Age), has been suggested to have spread into Europe with human groups expanding from the Eurasian steppe....

Genetic investigations of Upper Palaeolithic Europe have revealed a complex and transformative history of human population movements and ancestries, with evidence of several instances of genetic change across the European continent in the period following the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). Concurrent with these genetic shifts, the post-LGM period is c...

Extinct lineages of Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of the plague, have been identified in several individuals from Central Europe and Asia between 5,000 and 3,500 years before present (BP). One of these, the 'LNBA lineage' (Late Neolithic and Bronze Age), has been suggested to have spread into Central Europe with human groups expanding from t...

Extensive manipulations involved in the preparation of DNA samples for sequencing have hitherto made it impossible to determine the precise structure of double-stranded DNA fragments being sequenced, such as the presence of blunt ends, single-stranded overhangs, or single-strand breaks. We here describe MatchSeq, a method that combines single-stran...

The Forbes’ Quarry and Devil’s Tower partial crania from Gibraltar are among the first Neanderthal remains ever found. Here, we show that small amounts of ancient DNA are preserved in the petrous bones of the 2 individuals despite unfavorable climatic conditions. However, the endogenous Neanderthal DNA is present among an overwhelming excess of rec...

DNA preserved in ancient bones, teeth and sediments is typically highly fragmented and present only in minute amounts. Here, we provide a highly versatile silica-based DNA extraction protocol that enables the retrieval of short (≥35 bp) or even ultrashort (≥25 bp) DNA fragments from such material with minimal carryover of substances that inhibit li...

The number of DNA fragments surviving in ancient bones and teeth is known to decrease with fragment length. Recent genetic analyses of Middle Pleistocene remains have shown that the recovery of extremely short fragments can prove critical for successful retrieval of sequence information from particularly degraded ancient biological material. Curren...

DNA library preparation for high-throughput sequencing of genomic DNA usually involves ligation of adapters to double-stranded DNA fragments. However, for highly degraded DNA, especially ancient DNA, library preparation has been found to be more efficient if each of the two DNA strands are converted into library molecules separately. We present a n...

Faunal skeletal remains from prehistoric sites are often too fragmentary to enable identification at the species level based on morphology, complicating attempts to recover ancient DNA sequences from these remains. We designed a novel approach that enables large-scale screening of undiagnostic remains for the preservation of ancient mitochondrial D...

Excavations of a complex of caves in the Sierra de Atapuerca in northern Spain have unearthed hominin fossils that range in age from the early Pleistocene to the Holocene. One of these sites, the 'Sima de los Huesos' ('pit of bones'), has yielded the world's largest assemblage of Middle Pleistocene hominin fossils, consisting of at least 28 individ...

Significance Outside of permafrost, no contiguous DNA sequences have been generated from material older than ∼120,000 y. By improving our ability to sequence very short DNA fragments, we have recovered the mitochondrial genome sequence of a >300,000-y-old cave bear from Sima de los Huesos, a Spanish cave site that is famous for its rich collection...

The astrocytic response to ischemic brain injury is characterized by specific alterations of glial cell morphology and function. Various studies described both beneficial and detrimental aspects of activated astrocytes, suggesting the existence of different subtypes. We investigated this issue using a novel object-based approach to study characteri...