Hm. I know these are long dead people, and you'd think all of the bacterium would have been completely dead. But do archaeologists need to take special care, especially for known plague victims, in excavating and taking samples and analyzing? Or are they just so broken down the only reason they can reconstruct the DNA is by massive sampling to get enough fragments which more or less overlap and complete the DNA coding?
Hm. I know these are long dead people, and you'd think all of the bacterium would have been completely dead. But do archaeologists need to take special care, especially for known plague victims, in excavating and taking samples and analyzing? Or are they just so broken down the only reason they can reconstruct the DNA is by massive sampling to get enough fragments which more or less overlap and complete the DNA coding?
They take lots of precautions because it would really suck to do all that work and end up sequencing salmonella from the salad the researcher ate at lunch.
Well that, but I'm actually thinking the reverse. We do know that some microorganisms can be quite hardy, and survive things we wouldn't believe a few decades ago.
