King Richard III’s oral microbiome hints he had severe gum disease

Oral microbiome King Richard III of England was collected by examining plaque on his teeth and suggested that he had a disease that could destroy his jaw.

In 2012, skeletal remains were discovered under a car park in LeicesterGreat Britain, on the territory of the former Greyfriars Church. The remains were believed to be those of Richard III, who was killed at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 and brought to Leicester, as the head wounds matched the reports of his death and curvature of the spine matches his position. Genetic analysis later confirmed this. he was.

Although he reigned for only two years during the Wars of the Roses, Richard left a strong mark on English history: there were rumors that he plotted the murder of his nephews after placing them in the Tower of London, and William Shakespeare portrayed him as a ruthless villain in his play of the same name.

However, little is known about the king's daily life. To find out more, Purl from the University of Bath, UK, and her colleagues scraped samples of tartar, or hardened plaque, from three of his well-preserved teeth.

They did this because plaque can act as a time capsule, preserving DNA germs or food. “The amount of DNA resulting from King Richard III's calculations is among the highest we have ever measured in an archaeological context,” they wrote in the paper, which reported the discovery of more than 400 million DNA sequences.

“No one has sequenced ancient DNA up to 400 million sequences, that's just astronomy,” says Laura Weirich at Pennsylvania State University. “This shows us that we can probably do things with ancient DNA that we haven't thought about before.”

King and her colleagues identified about 400 species of microbes using DNA. The number and types of species were similar to those found in well-preserved dental calculus samples from England, Ireland, Germany and the Netherlands over the past 7,000 years, spanning the Neolithic period to the present. “This tells us that elite people share the same strains of microbes. [as everyone else]despite this extravagant lifestyle, despite the travel he could do and the wars,” Weirich says.

The team was unable to recover enough plant or animal DNA to examine Richard's diet. Nevertheless, previous analysis of his bones It was revealed that in the last two years of his life he consumed non-local wine and a lot of wild animals, fish and birds such as swans, herons and egrets.

However, Weirich says the microbiome results might have been different if the team had enlarged a sample from one part of one tooth and compared it with samples from an equivalent tooth in other populations, such as Germany or the Netherlands. We also have different bacteria in the front of the mouth and the back of the mouth, and inside and outside the teeth, so the team's limited samples can't tell us too much about Richard's oral microbiome as a whole, she says.

However, one abundant bacterium was Tannerella forsythia. It was associated with periodontal diseasesa serious gum infection that destroys the bone that supports the teeth. Oral hygiene in the 15th century was poor. Richard had tooth decay when he died he is 32 years old, but this does not mean that he necessarily had periodontal disease.

“One person may be colonized by potentially pathogenic bacteria and it will never cause any disease, whereas other people may have an infection,” says Pierre Stallfort at the Institute for Research of Natural Products and Biology of Infections named after. Leibniz in Germany. Weirich says determining whether Richard has periodontal disease will require testing to look for bone loss in his jaw.

“What I really like about this field is that it creates connections between the social sciences, history and genetics,” Stallforth says. “Just having access to the dental stones of historical figures is amazing because it allows us to better understand their lives.”