Chen Henrik Kozulin

The past 40 odd years have seen the rise and development of archaeogenetics as a field distinct from either genetics or archeology, successfully combining the two seemingly remote disciplines, and gaining wider recognition with the 2022 Nobel prize to Svante Paabo on the genomes of extinct hominins. Starting with considerable technical challenges, today, owing to the vast advancement of High Throughput Sequencing and interpretation abilities, the field lends insights to human evolution, migration patterns, agricultural development, health and disease dynamics and more recently it gained an ecological perspective.

A relatively new direction in archaeogenetics centres on expression and its regulation. This angle reveals functional dimensions of genetic regulation, thus contributing both to genetics - expanding the discourse to metabolic and phenotypic disparity and to archeology and history - revealing aspects that are often masked from the records. Due to lack of the obvious epigenetic targets, the investigation centers around deamination. This property is utilized to reconstruct DNA methylation maps, Differential Methylation Patterns, nucleosomal positioning and phenotype inference.

The project centers around the Pannonian basin, a region with rich history throughout the ages. During the Roman period it served as a border region of the empire - blending economic, demographic and cultural influences from local Celts, Romans and incursing neighboring tribes. This makes it a curious case for epigenetic profiling, revealing dietary adaptations, exposure to environmental stressors, differences relating to social stratification, adjustments to pandemics and to stress and trauma related to military life.