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丰富的文物，这些文物越来越引起分子科学家的兴趣。对古代DNA和同位素的研究可用于探索古代贸易和定居模式、原材料采购和人工制品制造、饮食和生存、进化、灭绝以及从地方到全球范围的恢复力等问题。这些分子技术还可以通过提供对博物馆标本的制造过程、来源和历史意义的新见解，以及帮助理解、预测和减轻降解过程，来提高藏品的价值。确定取样的内容和方法是极具挑战性的：虽然分子技术可以提供关于标本的前所未有的详细信息，但它们通常具有破坏性，需要明智的取样政策。

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.