In archaeology typically more than 80% of bone fragments found at archaeological sites remain unidentified. Bones with good diagnostic characters tend to be used for destructive analysis (radiocarbon dating, isotope and ancient DNA analysis) but these are also the most valuable for conventional archaeology. We will describe the development of ZooMS (short for Zoo archaeology by M ass S pectrometry) a method to identify all bones at a site. ZooMS is based upon recent work unravelling the unusual pattern of collagen decay in ancient bone. With the exception of the loss of telopeptides, the macromolecule is stable, remaining essentially unchanged for more than 600,000 years. ZooMS is conceptually similar to DNA ‘fingerprinting', it identifies the remaining bone fragments from the mass fingerprints of collagen peptides; the method is robust (bones retain collagen to > 145 °C) and rapid. We non-destructively extract collagen from < 1 mm 3 bone particles (4 hr), cleave with trypsin (overnight) and analyse the resulting peptides by MALDI-TOF MS (2 s -1 ). We will consider how this approach might be integrated within current methods to detect ruminant protein in feed, in alongside spectroscopy, conventional microscopy, and DNA analysis.
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M. Collins
M. Buckley
J. Wilson
N. van Doorn
J. Thomas-Oates
York University , United Kingdom
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