Manuscript Parchment and Ancient Sheep DNA Analysis

Parchment is the very material of medieval history and has been the subject of a variety of scientific investigations, including retrieval of DNA sequence from the source animals.  However, despite the attractiveness of this substrate, this  work has been limited and the quality of obtainable data questioned. In particular, PCR of parchment DNA has been problematic in some studies – one work suggested that multiple individuals, even species were represented in individual samples due to mixing inherent in the preparation process from animal skins.  Here we show results analyzing sheep sequences from 18thC and 17thC parchments using Illumina high throughput sequencing and argue that these indicate strong promise for this material as a genomic research target.