Thank you!

I hope that other researchers will now go back through their ancient genomes and find more carriers of integrated HHV6 viruses, as this is the first peek at an exciting global story.

It's tough to do molecular clock estimates on how fast these viruses mutate, because they can switch back and forth between evolving at the human mutation rate (relatively slow) and their own viral mutation rate (faster). Ancient DNA can currently only give us minimum ages for these viruses.

These viruses infect ~70% of adults, but between 0.5-3.5% of people worldwide actually have a 6A or B virus *in their genome*, hiding in a telomere, inherited from an ancient ancestor. We can see these ancient integration events were already present in Europe hundreds of years ago - minimum.

This work is likely just the start of better understanding the deep history and spatio-temporal dynamics of these importance viruses.

Great to play a role in this work, led from initial screening to final paper by Meriam Guellil @univie.ac.at.

There are likely many more HHV-6A/HHV-6B to be found in ancient human genomes to further support direct calibration of the age of integrated viral clades and acquired HHV infections.

Ancient genomes show that these viruses have been co-evolving with human populations across Europe, dating from early Italy to medieval England, Belgium, and Russia; underscoring a deep, ongoing host-virus history.

Through screening of ~4,000 archaeological human samples, this work reconstructed 11 ancient genomes of HHV-6A and HHV-6B. These viruses still infect many of us today.

We describe the first 11 ancient (fully and partially reconstructed) HHV-6 genomes (n=6 HHV-6A, n=5 HHV-6B) dating between the Italian Bronze Age and the 14th century CE & first findings on integrated dsDNA viruses in humans using ancient DNA (aDNA).

Congratulations Katerina!!