New paper out! 📄 My first adventures in (ancient) metagenomics. 🦠 “Exploring DNA degradation in situ and in museum storage through genomics and metagenomics” www.nature.com/articles/s42... Curious about the water color painting (see ALT text)? 🦌 Thread (Bluetorial?) with findings! 🧶👇 (1/n) - ThreadSky

jrotwitguez.bsky.social • 108 days ago

New paper out! 📄
My first adventures in (ancient) metagenomics. 🦠

“Exploring DNA degradation in situ and in museum storage through genomics and metagenomics” https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-025-07616-9

Curious about the water color painting (see ALT text)? 🦌

Thread (Bluetorial?) with findings!
🧶👇 (1/n)

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jrotwitguez.bsky.social•108 days ago

A nice, smooth collaboration with @amresearch.bsky.social , @nationalmuseet.bsky.social @matthewcollins.bsky.social , @hologenomics.bsky.social and others I couldn't find on Bluesky 🦋. (2/n)

jrotwitguez.bsky.social•108 days ago

For approximately 4,400 years, until the late 1950s, Native Greenlandic Inuit populations from the Aasivissuit ("summer camp") area in West Greenland maintained an annual tradition of traveling inland to hunt caribou (Rangifer tarandus) and fish for Arctic char (Salvelinus alpinus). (3/n)

jrotwitguez.bsky.social•108 days ago

During these traditional journeys, they retraced the same ancient pathways and camped on the same grounds as their ancestors. Caribou carcasses accumulated in layers over time. In 1978, archaeologists collected bones from a trench in Aasivissuit and transferred them to the National Museum of 🇩🇰 (4/n)

jrotwitguez.bsky.social•108 days ago

In 2021, 43 years later, the same team returned to the same location and collected new bone samples from the identical layers as in 1978. 😳

We extracted DNA and sequenced these bone samples to investigate post-excavation changes in endogenous DNA degradation in bone material. (5/n)

jrotwitguez.bsky.social•108 days ago

We compared DNA quality between bones preserved in-situ vs. ex-situ, important to take decisions regarding the conservation of archaeological heritage.

All samples derive from the same excavation unit, but differ in regards to storage, so it offers an excellent opportunity to test this. (6/n)

jrotwitguez.bsky.social•108 days ago

Our first finding was that endogenous DNA content, length and concentration preserve better in freshly excavated bones. DNA 5’ deamination was higher in 2021, but we hypothesize that higher DNA bond cleavage in the museum exposes new, undamaged molecules, hence reducing the deamination %. (7/n)

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