Jessica Hendy

TL;DR: This work reports the first, to their knowledge, high-resolution taxonomic and protein functional characterization of the ancient oral microbiome and demonstrates that the oral cavity has long served as a reservoir for bacteria implicated in both local and systemic disease.

TL;DR: Using protein tandem mass spectrometry, it is demonstrated that BLG is a species-specific biomarker of dairy consumption, and it is identified individuals consuming cattle, sheep, and goat milk products in the archaeological record.

TL;DR: This Perspective provides a best practice primer for researchers, reviewers and editors and presents a series of precautions and standards for ancient protein research that can be implemented at each stage of analysis, from sample selection to data interpretation.

TL;DR: It is concluded that systematic amplification bias confounds attempts to accurately reconstruct microbiome taxonomic profiles from 16S rRNA V3 amplicon data generated using universal primers, and advocate for the use of a shotgun metagenomics approach in ancient microbiome reconstructions.

TL;DR: Investigation of a putative early pastoralist population in northern Mongolia finds that dairy production was established on the Eastern steppe by 1300 BCE, suggesting that ruminant dairy pastoralism was introduced by local hunter-gatherers through a process of cultural transmission and minimal genetic exchange with outside groups.