Bolivian mummy rewrites scarlet fever’s past, suggesting killer bacterium circulated centuries before colonization
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Researchers have identified the genetic material of scarlet fever while examining a tooth from a naturally mummified skull housed at MUNARQ, the National Museum of Archaeology in La Paz. Using a method that reassembled previously unknown genomes from numerous short DNA fragments, they reconstructed a nearly complete, ancient genome of Streptococcus pyogenes. The reconstructed genome […]