PhD Studentship (AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Award with the Natural History Museum): Digital Tools for Molecular Conservation and Heritage

博物馆和档案馆收藏了大量的文化文物，分子科学家对此越来越感兴趣。对古代DNA和同位素的研究可以用来探索古代贸易和定居模式、原材料采购和工艺品制造、饮食和生存、进化、灭绝和从地方到全球的弹性等问题。这些分子技术还可以通过对博物馆标本的制造过程、来源和历史意义提供新的见解，以及帮助了解、预测和缓解退化过程，从而提高收藏品的价值。决定采样什么以及如何采样可能是极具挑战性的：虽然分子技术可以提供关于样本的前所未有的详细程度，但它们往往具有破坏性，需要知情的采样政策。

Museums and archives hold rich collections of cultural artefacts of increasing interest tomolecular scientists. Studies of ancient DNA and isotopes can be used to explore questions of ancient trade and settlement patterns, raw material procurement and artefact manufacture, diet and subsistence, evolution, extinction, and resilience from local to global scales. These molecular techniques can also enhance the value of the collections, by providing new insight into the manufacturing processes, provenance, and historical significance of museum specimens, as wellas helping to understand, predict and mitigate degradation processes. Determining what and how to sample can be extremely challenging: while molecular techniques can provide anunprecedented level of detail about a specimen, they are often destructive and require informed policies for sampling.