Protein Sequences from Mastodon and Tyrannosaurus Rex Revealed by Mass Spectrometry
Top Cited Papers
- 13 April 2007
- journal article
- other
- Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Science
- Vol. 316 (5822) , 280-285
- https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1137614
Abstract
Fossilized bones from extinct taxa harbor the potential for obtaining protein or DNA sequences that could reveal evolutionary links to extant species. We used mass spectrometry to obtain protein sequences from bones of a 160,000- to 600,000-year-old extinct mastodon (Mammut americanum) and a 68-million-year-old dinosaur (Tyrannosaurus rex). The presence of T. rex sequences indicates that their peptide bonds were remarkably stable. Mass spectrometry can thus be used to determine unique sequences from ancient organisms from peptide fragmentation patterns, a valuable tool to study the evolution and adaptation of ancient taxa from which genomic sequences are unlikely to be obtained.Keywords
This publication has 24 references indexed in Scilit:
- Soft tissue and cellular preservation in vertebrate skeletal elements from the Cretaceous to the presentProceedings Of The Royal Society B-Biological Sciences, 2007
- Freshly excavated fossil bones are best for amplification of ancient DNAProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2007
- Unraveling the sequence and structure of the protein osteocalcin from a 42ka fossil horseGeochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, 2006
- Mass Spectrometry and Protein AnalysisScience, 2006
- Collagen Structure: The Madras Triple Helix and the Current ScenarioIUBMB Life, 2005
- Proteomic analysis of post-translational modificationsNature Biotechnology, 2003
- An approach to correlate tandem mass spectral data of peptides with amino acid sequences in a protein databaseJournal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry, 1994
- Instability and decay of the primary structure of DNANature, 1993
- Basic Local Alignment Search ToolJournal of Molecular Biology, 1990
- Basic local alignment search toolJournal of Molecular Biology, 1990