“Dental plaque is the only part of your body that continuously hardens in life,” says Warinner.
This makes dental plaque ideal for encapsulating and storing DNA of bacteria. This enabled the researchers to extract DNA from extinct bacteria from the teeth of 12 Neanderthals in order to develop new types of antibiotics.
Saving human lives
More and more bacteria are becoming resistant to the types of antibiotics we have now. That makes it more difficult to treat certain infections.
Therefore, new types of antibiotics, developed from ancient strains of bacteria such as those found in Neanderthal dental plaque, could be an important tool in the service of public health. And ultimately, they may be able to help save lives.
Two new bacterial species in dental plaque, which lived from 126,000 to 11,700 years ago, were particularly interesting. Both are unique, although they resemble certain current bacterial species, and the researchers believe Neanderthals were infected by drinking from waterholes in caves.
‘Bacteria are the building blocks of almost all our antibiotics,’ Warinner explains. “We haven’t really developed any major new classes of antibiotics in recent years, and we’re running out of them,” she adds.
2023-05-24 03:02:40
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