Species Identification Of Ancient Textiles Based On Immunological Technique

Textiles in China have a long history.As early as the primitive society,people had mastered simple textiles technology and fabricated basic textiles by weaving the wild hemp to replace the fur.With the development of agriculture,sericulture and graziery,an ancient textile system was built gradually,which based on hemp,silk and wool as main textile raw materials.Textile relics have witnessed the social change,economic development and cultural integration throughout human history.They are precious historical materials for studying the economic,technical and cultural level in the ancient Chinese society.Proteinaceous textiles take a large share of the unearthed textile relics,which are easily damaged by moisture,temperature,pH and microorganisms.Under the terrible burial environment,proteinaceous textiles were usually degraded into peptides,leaving fragments or micro traces.Therefore,establishing a scientific and effective method to determine the species of ancient textiles is of great significance to trace the origin of textiles and to study human civilization.In this study,the characteristic proteins of ancient textiles were studied and specific amino acid sequences were selected as a hapten to prepare the specific antibodies.Then the antibody-based ELISA was established and employed in the detection of silk,wool,leather to achieve the species identification of ancient textile.1)The diagnostic amino acid sequence of Bombyx mori fibroin protein was used as a hapten to prepare polyclonal rabbit anti-silk fibroin antibody.The detection limit of ELISA was 158.49 ng/mL.The results showed that the ELISA can definitely discern silk produced by Bombyx mori from silk produced by wild species and the ancient samples used in this study were identified as Bombyx mori silk.2)Two kinds of polyclonal rabbit anti-keratin P antibody and K antibody were prepared by using distinctive amino acid sequence of goat hair as hapten and keratin extracted from wool as complete antigen.The detection limits of P and K antibodies were 6.81 ng/m L and 81.39 ng/m L,respectively.Modern wool and ancient samples both showed positive results,indicating the ancient samples were wool fabric.Results of proteomics indicated that Q6R650,Q6R649 were the characteristic keratin fragments of goat hair.3)The diagnostic amino acid sequence of cowhide collagen protein was chosen as a hapten to prepare polyclonal rabbit anti-cow collagen antibody.The lowest detection limit by ELISA was 904.74 ng/m L.The cowhide showed positive result,while the sheepskin showed weak positive result.In summary,we established the novel method of species identification of silk based on immunological technology,which provided a new research method for tracing the origin of silk and opened up new ideas for the species identification of other ancient proteinaceous materials.