ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2015
Paging through history: parchment as a reservoir of ancient DNA for next generation sequencing.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed, 67 citations in OpenAlex.
- Review
- Genomic analysis of three medieval parchments from German monasteries.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Minimally Invasive Vacuum-Aided Extraction Technique for the Lipid Analysis of Historic Parchment.Analytical chemistry · 2024Article
- Artefact Profiling: Panomics Approaches for Understanding the Materiality of Written Artefacts.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Touching the (almost) untouchable: a minimally invasive workflow for microbiological and biomolecular analyses of cultural heritage objects.Frontiers in microbiology · 2023Article
- Paleoproteomics.Chemical reviews · 2022Review
- Article
- Scratching the surface: the use of sheepskin parchment to deter textual erasure in early modern legal deeds.Heritage science · 2021Article
- Molecular identification and geographic origin of a post-Medieval elephant finding from southwestern Portugal using high-throughput sequencing.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Decoding the biological information contained in two ancient Slavonic parchment codices: an added historical value.Environmental microbiology · 2020Article
- Animal domestication in the era of ancient genomics.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2020Review
- Assessment of microbiota present on a Portuguese historical stone convent using high-throughput sequencing approaches.MicrobiologyOpen · 2020Article
- Metagenomic analysis of a blood stain from the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat (1743-1793).Infection, genetics and evolution : journal of molecular epidemiology and evolutionary genetics in infectious diseases · 2020Article
- A tale of textiles: Genetic characterization of historical paper mulberry barkcloth from Oceania.PloS one · 2020Article
- The Integration of Metagenomics and Chemical Physical Techniques Biodecoded the Buried Traces of the Biodeteriogens of Parchment Purple Spots.Frontiers in microbiology · 2020Review
- Unlocking the origins and biology of domestic animals using ancient DNA and paleogenomics.BMC biology · 2019Review
- Animal species identification in parchments by light.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Genetic analysis identifies the missing parchment of New Zealand's founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi.PloS one · 2019Article
- Not stealing from the treasure chest (or just a bit): Analyses on plant derived writing supports and non-invasive DNA sampling.PloS one · 2018Article
- The York Gospels: a 1000-year biological palimpsest.Royal Society open science · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 2 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Parchment represents an invaluable cultural reservoir. Retrieving an additional layer of information from these abundant, dated livestock-skins via the use of ancient DNA (aDNA) sequencing has been mooted by a number of researchers. However, prior PCR-based work has indicated that this may be challenged by cross-individual and cross-species contamination, perhaps from the bulk parchment preparation process. Here we apply next generation sequencing to two parchments of seventeenth and eighteenth century northern English provenance. Following alignment to the published sheep, goat, cow and human genomes, it is clear that the only genome displaying substantial unique homology is sheep and this species identification is confirmed by collagen peptide mass spectrometry. Only 4% of sequence reads align preferentially to a different species indicating low contamination across species. Moreover, mitochondrial DNA sequences suggest an upper bound of contamination at 5%. Over 45% of reads aligned to the sheep genome, and even this limited sequencing exercise yield 9 and 7% of each sampled sheep genome post filtering, allowing the mapping of genetic affinity to modern British sheep breeds. We conclude that parchment represents an excellent substrate for genomic analyses of historical livestock.
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