T. rex ganha uma reviravolta da proteína - colágeno pré-histórico identificado como contaminante moderno

2 June 2017

T. rex gets a protein shake-up – prehistoric collagen identified as modern contaminant

Palaeontologists at the University of Manchester have definitively proven there will never be a Jurassic Park after re-analysing collagen from a Tyrannosaurus rex bone discovered more than a decade ago.

It is probably the most common question Palaeontologists are asked by the public, “Could Jurassic Park become a reality?” The claims of protein sequences (peptides) surviving from a 68 million year old Tyrannosaurus rex fossil discovered ten years ago sparked the imagination of many scientists worldwide that, potentially, there may be hope one day.

Prehistoric proteins might well have supplied the first possible glimpse of the steps toward rebuilding dinosaurs. This discovery, however, was not met with universal acceptance and caused much debate among the scientific community. Subsequent analyses by the same team furthered this work with another dinosaur, this time the hadrosaur (duck-billed dinosaur), Brachylophosaurus. The main argument against this prior work was levelled at the possibility of bacterial contamination, but a more fundamental concern was the possibility of modern contamination from bones analysed in the laboratory.

Dr. Mike Buckley, from The University of Manchester’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, said: “The discovery of proteins in dinosaur bones sent a shockwave around the world, both among scientists and the public. It appeared that fiction was now being converted to fact through the application of new techniques.”

So a team based at the University of Manchester and at the National Museums Scotland, led by Dr Buckley, set out to explore the possibility of whether the claimed dinosaur peptides could have come from modern animals, given that ostriches and alligators that were known to be used by the labs in the original studies.

The Manchester team analysed samples of bone from three different ostriches, finding strong matches to all of the originally reported fossil peptides from both T. rex and Brachylophosaurus. These results highlight the need for robust authentication criteria when attempting to identify biomolecular sequence information from truly ancient fossilised material.

"The discovery of proteins in dinosaur bones sent a shockwave around the world, both among scientists and the public. It appeared that fiction was now being converted to fact through the application of new techniques." Dr. Mike Buckley

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READ MORE HERE/LEIA MAIS AQUI: University of Manchester