Abstract
If biopolymers could be isolated from archaeological specimens there would be good prospects of correlating the gene products from different populations of the same species, for example, according to their immunological specificities. Soft tissues are very poorly preserved after only decades, but the macroscopic appearance of bone and antler can remain unchanged for thousands of years. Methods which allow the extraction of relatively undegraded biopolymers from such materials would extend by several orders of magnitude the period from which biopolymers could be identified1. We report here that chondroitin sulphate, a polysaccharide characteristic of connective tissue and with chemical similarities to immunologically active glycosaminoglycans, has been isolated in good yield from fossilized antlers (3,000–130,000 yr old) which were demineralized by a new procedure. There are now prospects for using biochemical and immunological methods in situ and on isolated biopolymers to investigate the composition and mobility of populations of species in the past.
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Scott, J., Hughes, E. Chondroitin sulphate from fossilized antlers. Nature 291, 580–581 (1981). https://doi.org/10.1038/291580a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/291580a0
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