Objective
The advent of research into ancient bio-molecules has been a revolution in archaeology. Within bio-molecular science, this is one of the emerging strengths in European research. The recovery of ancient genetic information holds great promise for the understanding of human phylogeny, past migration, and epidemiology, and has the potential to contribute significantly to several areas in the European Scientific Area, such as analysis of emerging diseases, forensic medicine, and molecular anthropology. To date however, comparatively little is known of what determines DNA preservation in archaeological remains.
The goals of the project are to:
- Identify the processes of diagenetic change in bone that are determinants of DNA preservation.
- Further develop and integrate quantitative real time PCR, to shed light on the authentic DNA template quantity and quality, as well as the amount and species origin of micro-organismal DNA present in samples.
- Correlate the preservation of DNA to advanced histological characterization of bone and tooth samples identifying bacterial alteration, within the same samples, using state of the art analytical techniques.
The baseline comparison of characteristics at the morphological, histological, and molecular level is critical to the development of predictive criteria that could eventually serve as an objective framework within which to evaluate claimed results of DNA testing as authentic, or contaminant/artefact. Forensic identity testing is one area where the fields of ancient DNA analysis, bone diagenesis, archaeology, and physical anthropology escape from the bounds of knowledge-based scientific investigation to intersect society at an important applied level. One of the goals of this project is to further bridge the gap between pure science and applied science elements.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiological morphologycomparative morphology
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesmicrobiologybacteriology
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesgeneticsDNA
- natural sciencesphysical sciencesopticsmicroscopyelectron microscopy
- natural sciencesbiological scienceshistology
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Keywords
Call for proposal
FP6-2004-MOBILITY-6
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
OIF - Marie Curie actions-Outgoing International FellowshipsCoordinator
AMSTERDAM
Netherlands