Characterization of Ancient DNA from Late Roman Age Cattle of North-Eastern Italy By Next-Generation Sequencing: Preliminary Results

The preliminary results of the molecular characterization of 4 Bos taurus individuals of late Roman period (I century B.C.-IV century AD) are here presented. The cattle remains have been found during the excavation of a villa rustica at the archaeological site of Muris di Moruzzo (province of Udine) in North-Eastern Italy. Skeleton completeness and lack of butchery marks point to a disease epidemic as possible cause of death, an hypothesis supported also by historical records describing the occurrence of “bovine plague” outbreaks in that period. Ancient cattle DNA (aDNA) has been extracted from teeth and dental calculus in a dedicated lab facility, following stringent protocols for ancient samples. After the construction of genomic libraries, the individually tagged samples have been sequenced on an Illumina^® MiSeq platform to characterize the cattle genomes and to test the disease epidemic hypothesis.After quality control and filtering, sequence reads were analysed with mapDamage software to track and quantify DNA damage patterns typical of aDNA and subsequently mapped on the B. taurus reference genome. About 1% of total reads likely represented endogenous cattle aDNA. An analysis with MEGAN software showed that the remaining reads belonged to modern DNA of environmental origin (mostly fungi, plants and soil microorganisms). Presently ongoing analyses are focusing on i) the comparison of the Roman age bovines a DNA sequences to modern cattle genomes, and on ii) the investigation of the possible presence of pathogens by characterizing the bacterial sequences at the level of species.