4.5 Article

Comparison of two methods of extracting bone collagen for stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis: comparing whole bone demineralization with gelatinization and ultrafiltration

期刊

JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL SCIENCE
卷 47, 期 -, 页码 64-69

出版社

ACADEMIC PRESS LTD- ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2014.04.011

关键词

Palaeodiet; Stable isotope; Carbon; Nitrogen; Collagen extraction method

资金

  1. National Research Foundation of South Africa
  2. University of Cape Town
  3. Max-Planck Society
  4. German Science Foundation [DFG: NE1666/1-1]
  5. South African Research Chairs Initiative of the Department of Science and Technology

向作者/读者索取更多资源

We compare two methods of isolating bone collagen for stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis. The older method (as practised at the University of Cape Town) demineralizes bone 'chunks', while the newer method (as practised at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig) involves demineralization, gelatinization and ultra-filtration to select only higher molecular weight protein fragments for isotopic analysis. The latter method was developed for problematic (i.e. poorly-preserved) samples and while it is more rigorous, it is also significantly more expensive and more labor-intensive. Our aim is to find out whether there is any difference between the delta C-13 and delta N-15 of bone collagen isolated from relatively well-preserved bones using the two methods. Our sample set consists of 5 modern and 47 archaeological animal and human bones from the southern and western parts of South Africa. Archaeological specimens range in age from a few hundred to approximately six thousand years old. Collagen was extracted, its quality assessed using %C, %N and C:N, and delta C-13 and delta N-15 values measured independently in both laboratories. There are no statistically significant differences between the sets of delta C-13 and delta N-15 values from the two laboratories. For relatively well-preserved bones, the 'chunk' method of collagen preparation continues to be an acceptable alternative to more sophisticated collagen extraction protocols for C and N isotope analysis. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

作者

我是这篇论文的作者
点击您的名字以认领此论文并将其添加到您的个人资料中。

评论

主要评分

4.5
评分不足

次要评分

新颖性
-
重要性
-
科学严谨性
-
评价这篇论文

推荐

暂无数据
暂无数据