Survival of mineral-bound peptides into the Miocene
- University of Turin, Italy
- University of Copenhagen, Denmark
- Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
- University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
- The University of Texas at Austin, United States
Abstract
Previously we showed that authentic peptide sequences could be obtained from 3.8-Ma-old ostrich eggshell (OES) from the site of Laetoli, Tanzania (Demarchi et al., 2016). Here we show that the same sequences survive in a > 6.5 Ma OES recovered from a palaeosteppe setting in northwestern China. The eggshell is thicker than those observed in extant species and consistent with the Liushu Struthio sp. ootaxon. These findings push the preservation of ancient proteins back to the Miocene and highlight their potential for paleontology, paleoecology and evolutionary biology.
Data availability
Tandem mass spectra supporting peptide sequence identification are reported in Figure 3 and Figure 3 - Supplement 1 to 10.Raw mass spectrometry data and results of bioinformatics analysis are available via ProteomeXchange with identifier PXD035872.
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Ostrich eggshell peptides survival into the Miocene (6-9 Ma)ProteomeXchange, PXD035872.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Ministry of University and Research - Italy (Young Researchers - Rita Levi Montalcini)
- Beatrice Demarchi
Danish National Research Foundation (PROTEIOS (DNRF128))
- Meaghan Mackie
- Matthew J. Collins
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
- Julia Clarke
Jackson School of Geosciences,University of Texas at Austin
- Julia Clarke
Chinese National Science Foundation
- Zhiheng Li
- Tao Deng
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2022, Demarchi et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Survival of mineral-bound peptides into the Miocene
eLife 11:e82849.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.82849
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