Plenary talk title: Chasing Malaria through Time and Space! (15:30-16:00, Oct 11th)
Malaria-causing protozoa of the genus Plasmodium have exerted one of the strongest selective pressures on the human genome, and resistance alleles provide biomolecular footprints that outline the historical reach of these species. Nevertheless, debate persists over when and how malaria parasites emerged as human pathogens and spread around the globe. To address these questions, we generated high-coverage ancient mitochondrial and nuclear genome-wide data from P. falciparum, P. vivax and P. malariae from 16 countries spanning around 5,500 years of human history. We identified P. vivax and P. falciparum across geographically disparate regions of Eurasia from as early as the fourth and first millennia BCE, respectively; for P. vivax, this evidence pre-dates textual references by several millennia. Genomic analysis supports distinct disease histories for P. falciparum and P. vivax in the Americas: similarities between now-eliminated European and peri-contact South American strains indicate that European colonizers were the source of American P. vivax, whereas the trans-Atlantic slave trade probably introduced P. falciparum into the Americas. Our data underscore the role of cross-cultural contacts in the dissemination of malaria, laying the biomolecular foundation for future palaeo-epidemiological research into the impact of Plasmodium parasites on human history. Finally, our unexpected discovery of P. falciparum in the high-altitude Himalayas provides a rare case study in which individual mobility can be inferred from infection status, adding to our knowledge of cross-cultural connectivity in the region nearly three millennia ago.
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EN Johannes Krause focuses on the analysis of ancient DNA to investigate such topics as pathogens from historic and prehistoric epidemics, human genetic history, and human evolution. He has contributed to deciphering Neanderthal genetics and the shared genetic heritage of Neanderthals and modern humans. In 2010, while working at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, he discovered the first genetic evidence of the Denisovans, an extinct hominin found in the Altai Mountains in Siberia. His recent work includes revealing the genetic heritage of ancient Egyptians, reconstructing the oldest modern human genome, studying late Pleistocene genomes from Africa, Central Asia and Europe, uncovering the source of the epidemic plague bacteria that periodically caused historic and prehistoric epidemics in Eurasia, studying the evolution and genetic history of pathogens such as Mycobacterium leprae, M. tuberculosis, Treponema pallidum, Hepatitis B virus, Salmonella enterica, Helicobacter pylori and the Herpes virus, as well as clarifying the complex history of Western Eurasia’s prehistoric mass migrations.