silver has been known and used as a potent antimicrobial and wound healing agent since ancient time. silver compounds have had other ancient applications through which greeks, romans and egyptians had used silver compounds as food and water preservative. silver and silver-based antimicrobials were put away after the discovery of antibiotics. meanwhile, with almost a century application of antib...

For more than 25 years, ever since I was exposed to Latin in high school and then to Ancient Greek while an undergraduate at Yale, I have been fascinated by language and more particularly by the ancient languages of the wide-ranging group of languages known as the Indo-European family (to which English, French, Spanish, Lithuanian, Russian, Hindi, etc. all belong). This early enthusiasm deepene...

Tuberculosis is one of most ancient diseases affecting human populations. Although numerous studies have tried to detect pathogenic DNA in ancient skeletons, the successful identification of ancient tuberculosis strains remains rare. Here, we describe a study of 140 ancient subjects inhumed in Yakutia (Eastern Siberia) during a tuberculosis outbreak, dating from the 16(th)-19(th) century. For a...

The detection of ancient microbial DNA offers a new approach for the study of infectious diseases, their occurrence, frequency and host-pathogen interaction in historic times and populations. Moreover, data obtained from skeletal and mummified tissue may represent an important completion of contemporary phylogenetic analyses of pathogens. In the last few years, a variety of bacterial, protozoal...

In medical history of different nations, there are numerous documents concerning cancer. The present study is an investigation in ancient books to determine the part that medicine of Iran has played in the recognition of cancer. In all 31 Iranian medical and 5 Islamic medicine books mostly from 8 to 18 cent. A.D. have been examined. The findings showed that cancer in ancient medical books of Ir...

Projection analysis is a tool that extracts information from the joint allele frequency spectrum to better understand the relationship between two populations. In projection analysis, a test genome is compared to a set of genomes from a reference population. The projection's shape depends on the historical relationship of the test genome's population to the reference population. Here, we explor...

A novel method of library construction that takes advantage of a single-stranded DNA ligase has been recently described and used to generate high-resolution genomes from ancient DNA samples. While this method is effective and appears to recover a greater fraction of endogenous ancient material, there has been no direct comparison of results from different library construction methods on a diver...

india is on the verge of becoming the diabetic capital of the world. the fact is that even in ancient india diabetes was prevalent and reference of diabetic-like condition is there in atharvaveda, known as one of the oldest literature in the world. a search through ancient indian religious, political and medical scripture shows various references of diabetes, better known aspramehaor madhumehat...