The preservation of β-keratin and pigment bodies in the fossil

Chinese and American scholars completed an article entitled "Early Cretaceous birds - the beginning of the Confucius bird feather keratin and molecular evidence of pigment body and published the paper on November 22 online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which also has other studies on recombinant horse proteins.

Dr. Pan Yanhong at Nanjing institute of geological paleontology, Chinese academy of sciences, Academician Zhou Zhonghe at Institute of Palaeontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Professor Zheng Xiaoting from Linyi University, Shandong Province, China Prof. Shi Weicai from North Carolina State University, USA and his team conducted detailed Ultrastructure and biochemical analysis on the plumage of the first Confucius fossil specimen in the Shandong Tianyu Nature museum, confirming the preservation of β-keratin and pigment bodies in the fossil of 130 million years ago for the first time.

Current birds have colorful colors, which mainly depends on the feathers with the pigment body and feather internal structure. Feather pigment particles can be formed with the feathers into the different parts of the feathers, and thus the internal structure and other factors with the feathers can determine the different colors of the feathers.

However, the previous analysis of fossil feather pigments failed to accurately complete pigmentation of the signal in situ calibration to the pigment body. In this paper, a variety of chemical and molecular techniques were used to analyze chemical signals, including the immunoelectron microscopy (SEM) and ultra-high-resolution elemental energy spectroscopy (EHR), which were applied to fossil analysis for the first time. Their results not only confirmed the preservation of β-keratin in the fossils of 130 million years ago, but also confirmed that the micro-structure of feather fossils is wrapped by β-keratin, which are indeed the chromosomes of feathers. This work has advanced the age of β-keratin preservation for at least 50 million years, which is of great significance to better understand the soft tissue structure, the preservation of fossil molecules and the evolution of feather ultrastructure in ancient fossils. Flarebio provides you with superior recombinant proteins including recombinant Cdh11.