Illustration of Hepatitis viral particlesISTOCK, SARATHSASIDHARANMore than 250 million people worldwide are currently living with Hepatitis B virus (HBV), which infects the liver. While hundreds of thousands of them die each year of HBV-related complications such as cirrhosis and liver cancer, the virus’s origins are still not well understood. In a study published today (May 9) in Nature, researchers find evidence of HBV in human genomes from Eurasian remains dating from around 200 to 4,500 years ago, suggesting that people have been living with the virus for thousands of years.
“In the Hep. B field, we’ve always thought that HBV was an ancient pathogen of humans, but there hasn’t been any evidence” older than about 400 years, until this study, Margaret Littlejohn, a senior medical scientist at the Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory of the Doherty Institute in Melbourne, Australia, who did not participate in the work, tells The Scientist. “It’s certainly a great leap for the field.”
The work began with an investigation by Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Cambridge and the University of Copenhagen, and colleagues designed to understand human population history across an 8,000-kilometer-wide swath of Europe and Asia. The researchers sequenced the genomes of more than 200 ancient humans, whose remains ranged from 11,000 to 500 years ...
