Expanding Application of Proteomics-based Research in Archaeological Residue Analysis

在美国国家科学基金会的支持下，Steve Wolverton博士和一个由考古学家、分析化学家和蛋白质组生物学家组成的团队将用现代烹饪陶器进行埋葬实验，并对考古陶器进行研究，以评估气候、土壤和陶瓷糊的变化对食物蛋白质残留物保存的作用。这个项目建立在由美国国家科学基金会资助的先前研究的基础上，在该研究中，同一个团队研究了哪种类型的溶剂和物理条件最适合从烹饪陶器中提取蛋白质残留物。与其他类型的食物残留物相比，蛋白质残留物具有独特的优势，因为它们与陶壁中的粘土结合在一起，从而增强了保存能力，而且蛋白质通常可以被识别为物种，甚至可能是组织。一个重要的障碍是，介导蛋白质残基长期保存的因素尚未得到很好的研究，这是本项目在实验和考古环境中的重点。这项研究很重要，因为它将提供一套新的工具，使考古学家能够研究过去文化中以前无法触及的方面。这将有助于重建过去的生存模式，并深入了解人口如何适应他们所生活的环境。目前普遍缺乏对残留分析方法开发的详细研究。就知识价值而言，蛋白质残留物极有可能提供过去人们在锅中烹饪的精确数据，这使得实验方法的复制成为必不可少的过程。可靠的分析方法的产生和对蛋白质保存条件的了解将极大地扩大或增加对古代食品中蛋白质残留物的了解。该项目涉及来自阿根廷和美国的学生和专业人士，分别来自博物馆（阿根廷），非营利公共教育/考古研究公司（美国）和大学（美国）。这项工作的性质是高度跨学科的，包括考古学、陶瓷岩石学、材料科学、化学和生物学方面的专业人员。该项目将资助一名研究生与这个跨学科团队合作两个学年。研究结果将发表在学术期刊上，并将在学术会议和课堂上展示。

With National Science Foundation support, Dr Steve Wolverton and a team of archaeologists, analytical chemists, and proteomic biologists will do burial experiments with modern cooking pottery and research on archaeological pottery to evaluate the role of variability in climate, soil, and ceramic paste on the preservation of food protein residues. This project builds on previous research funded by NSF in which the same team addressed which types of solvents and physical conditions work best for extraction of protein residues from cooking pottery. Protein residues offer distinctive advantages over other types of food residues in that they bind to clay in pottery walls, which enhances preservation, and that proteins can often be identified to species or perhaps even to tissue. An important hurdle is that factors that mediate long-term preservation of protein residues have not been well studied, the focus of this project in both experimental and archaeological settings.This research is important because it will provide a new set of tools which will allow archaeologists to examine previously inaccessible aspects of past culture. It will help to reconstruct past subsistence patterns and provide insight into how populations adapted to the environments in which they lived. Residue analysis in general has lacked for detailed studies of method development. In terms of intellectual merit, the high potential of protein residues to provide precise data on what people cooked in pots in the past makes experimental replication of methods an essential process. Production of reliable analytical approaches and knowledge of conditions in which proteins are more and less likely to preserve will greatly amplify or current knowledge of protein residues from ancient foods.This project involves students and professionals from Argentina and the United States, from a museum (Argentina), a non-profit public-education/archaeological research firm (US), and universities (US). The nature of the work is highly interdisciplinary, incorporating professionals with specialties in archaeology, ceramic petrography, material science, chemistry, and biology. The project will fund a graduate student for two academic years to work with this interdisciplinary team. Results will be published in scholarly journals and will be presented at academic conferences and in classroom settings.