Multiple approaches in the study of ancient human microbiome

Abstract

Research related to the analysis of microbial communities in ancient human samples began two decades ago. Since then, new technologies as well as new bioinformatic tools have been developed for the manipulation of massive data. All this together, with the theoretical knowledge generated from microbial ecology has expanded our understanding of the human microbiome. Despite the challenge of studying ancient samples and their microbiome, some approaches applied to the contemporary human microbiome have been successfully applied to ancient samples. Most studies in ancient samples have focused on taxonomic profiling at the community level with metagenomic or high-throughput 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing data. However, other approaches have emerged in order to get deeper understanding of the ancient human microbiome. Therefore, the aim of this review is to discuss all the approaches and methodologies successfully applied to ancient samples and ancient microbiome as well as the information that can be generated using them, in order to understand the evolution of human microbiome interactions throughout history.