Species Id.

MS/MS-BASED BONE CHIP SPECIES IDENTIFICATION

Palaeoanthropology borrowed ZooMS to screen sample sets encompassing thousands of bone chips from caves known to be occupied by anatomically modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans to identify hominin remains and further characterise them through deep palaeogenomic sequencing. Despite being cheap and robust, ZooMS, now 15 years old, has some clear limitations, because it commonly uses MALDI-TOF-MS instruments that are less sensitive and have lower resolution compared to what is now the state-of-the-art proteomics technology, i.e. Orbitrap (commercialised by partner organisation Thermo). Furthermore, ZooMS data interpretation is still manual and as such tedious and error- prone. PROJECT 7 will apply the same approach based on data-independent acquisition (DIA) tandem MS and the ultra-fast peptide separation technology (~8 mins/run) partner organisation EvoSEP patented, to screen at low cost with Orbitrap technology up to 200 samples per day. The advantages over ZooMS will be represented by the acquisition of a much richer dataset per sample, higher sensitivity, higher automation, and the ability to use off-the-shelf spectral identification software.