Leveraging palaeoproteomics to address conservation and restoration agendas

Carli Peters; Kristine K Richter; Jens-Christian Svenning; Nicole Boivin

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2022.104195

Leveraging palaeoproteomics to address conservation and restoration agendas

iScience. 2022 Apr 4;25(5):104195. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.104195. eCollection 2022 May 20.

Authors

Carli Peters¹, Kristine K Richter², Jens-Christian Svenning³, Nicole Boivin^{1

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Affiliations

¹ Department of Archaeology, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany.
² Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
³ Center for Biodiversity Dynamics in a Changing World (BIOCHANGE), Department of Biology, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
⁴ School of Social Science, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4071, Australia.
⁵ Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, USA.
⁶ Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada.

Abstract

Archaeological and paleontological records offer tremendous yet often untapped potential for examining long-term biodiversity trends and the impact of climate change and human activity on ecosystems. Yet, zooarchaeological and fossil remains suffer various limitations, including that they are often highly fragmented and morphologically unidentifiable, preventing them from being optimally leveraged for addressing fundamental research questions in archaeology, paleontology, and conservation paleobiology. Here, we explore the potential of palaeoproteomics-the study of ancient proteins-to serve as a critical tool for creating richer, more informative datasets about biodiversity change that can be leveraged to generate more realistic, constructive, and effective conservation and restoration strategies into the future.

Keywords: Biological sciences; Evolutionary biology; Paleobiology; Systems biology; Zoology.

Publication types

Review