International Journal of Osteoarcbaeology, Vol. 5: 299-301 (1 995)

Correspondence

'DNA of Mycobacterium feprae Detected by PCR in Ancient Bone' by Rafi et al. (1)

This paper does not conform to the scientific standards of your journal for the following reasons.

(i) The authors refer t o the paper by Spigeiman and Lemma' in which they claim to be the first to identify, through PCR, a mycobacterial DNA extracted from ancient bones. The techniques developed in this earlier work were, apparently, applied to the specimens in the present case. However, there does not appear to be any new method used, other than in the preparation of the bone; more importantly, no method which is acceptable for ancient bones, such as nested PCR, is described.

( i i ) In neither paper is there any visualization of agarose gel electrophoresis referring to the amplified DNA and controls, although this is essential.

( i i i ) The length of ancient DNA fragments is referred to as of no more than 200 base pairs, without discussing the sequencing result of these fragments. This is surprising because identification of these fragments is essential for detecting contamination.

(iv) The primers are not formulated and discussed although this is accepted practice for PCR work.

(v) The sample shown in Figure 1 (their sample 4) does not appear very typical of leprosy macroscopically.

As in the first paper, the usual presentation for scientific work has been ignored, making it difficult to find material, methods, results or discussion clearly situated within the paper. Finally, even if the study and its propositions are worthy of attention, the presentation is too

CCC 1047-482X/95/030299-03 0 1995 by John WiIey & Sons, Ltd.

unclear and short of scientific evidence to be acceptable as a Short Report in this journal.

References 1. Spigelman, M. and Lemma, E. The use of the

polymerase chain reaction to detect Mycobacterium tuberculosis in ancient skeletons. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 1993; 3: 137-143.

JOEL BLONDIAUX Walincourt,

France

T o clarify the recent report by Rafi et a/ . ' we would like to point out that we did not repeat the experiment of Spigelman and Lemma2 to present at the first conference of the Ancient Biomolecules Inititative in Cambridge. Our poster entitled 'The detection of Mycobacterium tuberculosis by PCR from ancient human bone' presented at that conference was, in fact, based on methods first described by Hagelberg and Clegg ( 1991).3

References 1 . Rafi, A, Spigelman, M., Stanford, J., Lemma, E.,

Donohue, H. and Zias, J. DNA of Mycobacterium leprae detected by PCR in ancient bone. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 1994; 4 287-290.

2. Spigelman, M. and Lemma, E. The use of the polymerase chain reaction to detect Mycobacterium tuberculosis in ancient skeletons. International Journal of Osteoarcbaeology 1993; 3: 137-143.

3. Hagelberg, E. and Clegg, J. B. Recovery of DNA from archaeological bone. Proc. R. SOC. Lond. B 199 1 244: 45-50.

CHARLOTTE ROBERTS Department of ArcbaeoIojical Sciences

University of Bradford

RONALD DIXON Department of Biomedical Sciences

University of Bradford