A Proteomic Approach to Determine Sex in Zooarchaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Sex determination from animal skeletal remains can be challenging as it relies on sex specific bones or osteometrics. Determining sex is beneficial in understanding animal husbandry practices, as well as human-animal interactions. Building on previous work with humans, here we present a proteomic approach for determining sex from tooth enamel in nonhuman mammals. The protein amelogenin, which makes up 90% of the tooth enamel, is dimorphic and coded by the X and Y chromosomes. The protein products of the X and Y gene have been recovered in human tooth enamel and used to determine sex with the absence of the Y protein. This proteomic method has been shown to be less expensive and less destructive than genetic analysis from teeth, which has potential for allelic dropout. To evaluate this approach in nonhuman mammals, four mammalian species (dogs, coyotes, beavers, and deer) were tested in a blind study from research collections in the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. Mass Spectrometry was applied to identify the amelogenin protein. We present here the findings of this experiment and further characterize species specific amelogenin proteins. Our research demonstrates how proteomic characterization of the amelogenin can be broadly applied to zooarchaeology.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33320