In April 2022, our new ZooMS laboratory will start operating at the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, in the Faculty of Life Sciences and the brand new, state-of-the-art Biology Centre.
A new Bruker Autoflex maX MALDI-MS system is to be installed in late March and we hope to be able to offer our services in the months to come. FINDER ERC Project and other new ZooMS-based projects will soon start operating from Vienna.
If interested to work with us, do get in touch!
One of the biggest challenges I faced when becoming engaged with the palaeoproteomics/ZooMS community was the lack of transparency in terms of the actual analytical protocols used, from the wet chemistry laboratory procedures, to equipment settings, data analyses and full data deposition in open access. I used to joke and call the method “the best kept secret in archaeological science”. But it was not funny.
To ensure that my lab’s workflow and results were not only as transparent as possible, but also reproducible and fully accessible by any interested party, we (a community of several specialists) committed in 2018 to work towards the “democratisation” of ZooMS.
The first step towards this was to test and publicise in a free and accessible format our analytical protocols. In a series of publications, the 3 main wet chemistry protocols we use at the ZooMS/Palaeoproteomics laboratories of the Max Planck for the Science of Human History (where I was based until 2021) as well as in my lab at the University of Vienna, are described and deposited in protocols.io. In more detail:
In a publication in the Journal of Proteomics we test the aforementioned protocols on 400 archaeological bones from different parts of the world. This allowed us to compare how each protocol works depending on collagen preservation. Our results indicate that the least-destructive ZooMS protocol which uses an ammonium bicarbonate buffer as a means of extracting collagen is most suitable for bones with good collagen preservation, whereas the acid-based methodologies can improve success rates for bones with low-to-medium collagen preservation
The full reference and publication can be found here:
Wang, N., Brown, S., Ditchfield, P., Hebestreit, S., Kozilikin, M., Luu, S., Oshan, W., Grimaldi, S., Chazan, M., Horwitz Kolska, L., Spriggs, M. Summerhayes, Gl, Shunkov, M., Korzow Richter, K., Douka, K., Testing the efficacy and comparability of ZooMS protocols on archaeological bone. Journal of Proteomics. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jprot.2020.104078
Denisovans are elusive in many ways. When did they first appear and where, how spread where they geographically and how the different Denisovan populations interacted with each other and with other archaic and modern human populations?
A small step towards understanding their early appearance, their toolkit and subsistence strategies, was the discovery of new Denisovan remains using ZooMS and subsequent genetic analyses from the lowermost, securely dated layers of the East Gallery of Denisova Cave. At 200,000 years before present, these new Denisovans are the oldest so far identified anywhere in the world.
This work is published in Nature Ecology and Evolution and can be accessed here https://rdcu.be/cB2U4. It has also made the cover of the January 2022 issue of the journal! We are very excited to see these beauties attracting the spotlight they deserve!
For a first-person account of how ZooMS works and how it was applied to the bone assemblage from Denisova Cave you can see the post by ex FINDER PhD student Dr Samantha Brown here . The genetic analyses were led by post-doc Dr Diyendo Massilani from the MPI EVA in Leipzig.
Needless to say that no scientific analyses could have been accomplished in the Denisova bone assemblage without our Siberian colleagues from the IAET RAS SB (Profs. Shunkov and Derevianko, Dr Maxim Kozlikin) painstakingly excavating the site for almost 6 months each year and offering their valuable support and expertise.
Dr Katerina Douka | Associate Professor in Archaeological Science