REAL LIFE NEWS: HOW OLD PARCHMENT HELPS US TO UNDERSTAND SHEEP GENETICS
by Hazed
By examining old documents, scientists have been able to map the genetic history of sheep. But it’s not the words written that are providing the valuable information – it’s the parchment itself.
Parchment was used for legal documents before the mass production of paper. It is made using the skin of an animal – usually a sheep. Legal documents are generally carefully preserved, and what’s more they are accurately dated, and are sitting in archives, organised in a way to make it easy to examine them.
So a pilot project carried out by Trinity College Dublin has been taking samples of parchment and analysing the genes of the sheep that they came from. “This pilot project suggests that parchments are an amazing resource for genetic studies that consider agricultural development over the centuries,” Professor Daniel Bradbury said.
The results show which breeds of sheep were used to produce the parchment, which means that a long history of livestock can be built up to show how the definitive regional breeds came to be, after selective breeding was introduced in the 18th century.
