RE: Another type of genome test for artifacts
swigut > 03-01-2021, 05:05 AM
Nanopore technology is ridiculously error prone though still usable and sensitive. Perhaps applying ancient DNA methods would be more useful here, but it is also questionable what kind of additional information we would gather and how much of the original artifact would have to be destroyed. The best place to extract would be somewhere where the scribes would touch/interact a lot, but people handling it later were unlikely to do so (bindng edge?)
We would likely recover DNA for the animal source of parchment, but that can be done with simpler techniques. Since the gall inks are acidic we actually expect DNA degradation there (so the test under the ink might yield worse results). We would likely get many human genomes (various people handled the manuscripts), but unlikely with enough evidence to be unmixed even with very deep sequencing. Possibly signs of the DNA degradation could allow for dating the DNA reads, so one could consider only the DNA reads in the worst shape, assuming they are most likely the oldest. Presence of DNA with non-european characteristic could validate some theories of the underlying language.
The manuscript travelled a lot so we also expect a lot of enviromental DNA from pollen, dust and microbes, not sure if these can be used to point origins or travel path.
Unless the author used his own blood or sperm (yes it was used in the past as invisible ink) to write or sign it is unlikely we would get the genome of the scribe with certainity. If we could get enough relatively clean DNA to genotype the scribe, we could probably roughly locate his birthplace if he was European (+/- 500km ?), or point to other human populations around the world.