This post was originally publishedon the SpringerOpen blog
A well thumbed page, signs of devotional affection on the worn away image of a saint, spilt liquid from a careless reader, microscopic organisms inhabiting the surface, the biological signals captured in parchment manuscripts hold a plethora of hidden information just waiting to be ‘read’.
Hamlet: Is not parchment made of sheepskins?
Horatio: Ay, my lord, and of calfskins too.
Hamlet (Act V, Scene I)
These documents, stored in libraries and archives around the world, are not only stores of textual information, but as was self evident in the days of Shakespeare (see the quote from Hamlet), are also stores of biological data.
An intriguing symmetry can be found in the fact that most of European history is written on the skins of animals, transformed into a writing medium, which now represents one of the best historic biobanks in existence.
Much like deciphering an extinct script, revealing the biomolecular information contained in these objects can reveal information that we would never have thought possible.
Why is it important?
With increasing concerns about biodiversity and the importance of maintaining rare breeds, parchment is a window into what medieval animals were really like. By looking at the DNA of these manuscripts we can start to see how similar or different medieval livestock was to present day animals and how much genetic variety has been lost through intensive breeding programs. It can also give insights into historic livestock economies by identifying the species of animals used and it can inform us about kill off patterns by looking at the sex of the animals and it may even offer evidence of geographic origin.
未开发的资源
Thanks to curatorial and conservation expertise these invaluable documents have been carefully preserved providing us with what can now be considered an extraordinary biobank (in terms of quality of preservation and provenance), which has so far been relatively unexamined.
这些文件相对被科学界相对解读的主要原因是与可访问性有关。
Due to their importance as a record of written information, books are conferred a special status, often not shared by other historic or archaeological artefacts, meaning that their preservation is paramount and the amount of destructive sampling permitted is minimal.
The development of非侵入性采样技术已经前所未有地访问这些宝贵的文件，允许我们在这些手稿中持有的生物学故事中阐明。
Taking full advantage of the ‘omics revolution we are now at a point where an incredibly small non-invasive sample can give us a wealth of information, which can inform about book production, geographic preferences, sex and breed of animals and even information about the handling, use and storage of the object.
However, just because we have the means to analyse huge amounts of biomolecular data we have to be careful not to over engineer our analysis to answer what is perhaps a relatively simple question.
So you want to do biocodicology?
在新的生物典科论领域中，我们希望掌控手稿作为生物记录的重要性，而不仅仅是科学界的“资源”，而且还要促进生物技术的使用，了解更多关于手稿自己及其历史和使用的信息。我们已经努力建立生物发作，作为真正的跨学科领域，将专业知识与保护者，人文学者和科学家组合起来，以解决所有这些问题。
因此，我们创造了可以被认为是什么‘user guide’对于哪些技术可用，他们可以且无法回答，以及某些路线应该受到其他人。我们希望本次审查将为这位人文主义员和科学家提供初步，以这真正的照明领域。
评论