The preservation of DNA in the teeth of humans dating as far back as 1,500 years have revealed the ancient origins of the pervasive herpes virus strain that causes cold sores.
"Facial herpes hides in its host for life and only transmits through oral contact, so mutations occur slowly over centuries and millennia. We need to do deep time investigations to understand how DNAThe herpes family has a broad and long history, spanning multiple species, and going back millions of years. Of the 115 herpesviruses that we currently know of, only eight infect humans. Herpes simplex virus 1 is the most common of these, associated with cold sores.
How HSV-1 emerged as the dominant human strain has been something of a mystery, and surprisingly difficult to trace. So a team of researchers decided to look more carefully into ancient remains.As DNA sequencing has become quicker and less costly, archaeologists, over recent years, assembled libraries of the DNA retrieved from ancient remains. From these libraries, researchers went looking for traces of HSV-1 in the archaeological record – and found it extremely scarce.
Two of the individuals hailed from Cambridge in the UK. One was a young adult male from the late 14th century, who was buried on the grounds of a medieval charitable hospital. His teeth showed significant signs of horrendous dental abscesses. The other, an adult woman, lived and died in Cambridgeshire in around the 6th to 7th centuries, and her dentition also showed signs of gum disease.
This returned a timeline that suggested the form of HSV-1 plaguing the world today arose during the Bronze Age, after humans had migrated from the Eurasion steppe grasslands and into Europe, producing a population boom.
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