Survival of mineral-bound peptides into the Miocene
Curation statements for this article:-
Curated by eLife
eLife Assessment
The paper pushes the known preservation of ancient proteins, and their successful recovery, into the late Miocene. The results of the study also have implications for avian taxonomic classification. The findings reported in the paper are a welcome addition to the field of paleoproteomics and encourage future research on ancient proteins in deep antiquity and across various taxa. The paper will be of great interest to paleoscientists.
This article has been Reviewed by the following groups
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- Evaluated articles (eLife)
- Evolutionary Biology (eLife)
Abstract
Previously, we showed that authentic peptide sequences could be obtained from 3.8-Ma-old ostrich eggshell (OES) from the site of Laetoli, Tanzania (Demarchi et al., 2016). Here, we show that the same sequences survive in a >6.5 Ma OES recovered from a palaeosteppe setting in northwestern China. The eggshell is thicker than those observed in extant species and consistent with the Liushu Struthio sp. ootaxon. These findings push the preservation of ancient proteins back to the Miocene and highlight their potential for paleontology, paleoecology, and evolutionary biology.
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Author Response
Reviewer #1 (Public Review):
This paper is a continuation of other research by this group and represents another step back in time for peptide preservation in eggshells. It is exciting to see Miocene age peptides and that they overlap so completely with both extant ostrich struthiocalcin as well as the previously described Pliocene peptides. The biggest weakness is the lack of tables showing both the de novo peptides as well as those detected by database searching.
We thank the Reviewer for their positive assessment of our work. We now provide a table with peptides identified by database searching as well as the annotated tandem mass spectra for the peptides.
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eLife Assessment
The paper pushes the known preservation of ancient proteins, and their successful recovery, into the late Miocene. The results of the study also have implications for avian taxonomic classification. The findings reported in the paper are a welcome addition to the field of paleoproteomics and encourage future research on ancient proteins in deep antiquity and across various taxa. The paper will be of great interest to paleoscientists.
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Reviewer #1 (Public Review):
This paper is a continuation of other research by this group and represents another step back in time for peptide preservation in eggshells. It is exciting to see Miocene age peptides and that they overlap so completely with both extant ostrich struthiocalcin as well as the previously described Pliocene peptides. The biggest weakness is the lack of tables showing both the de novo peptides as well as those detected by database searching.
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Reviewer #2 (Public Review):
In this manuscript, the authors use tandem mass spectrometry to identify peptides from the eggshell protein struthiocalcin-1 preserved in a fossilized eggshell ~6.5 Ma years old. They report multiple peptide spectral matches (peptide identifications) to a small section of the struthiocalcin-1 protein. The high-resolution, well-annotated spectral matches provided by the authors show that that region of struthiocalcin-1 may be preferentially preserved in ancient ostrich shell tissue.
These findings are important because Cenozoic tissues greater than 1 Ma in age are drastically unexplored in terms of protein preservation. Thus, these data represent a big step forward in the investigation of proteomic preservation throughout the Cenozoic.
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