Ancient DNA is offering clues to puzzle of Dead Sea scrolls, say experts | Hacker News Reader

Ancient DNA is offering clues to puzzle of Dead Sea scrolls, say experts

theguardian.com

45 pointsdiodorus5 comments

Here's the paper for anyone interested https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30552-3#.Xt...

I'm one of the middle-authors on this. Happy to try and answer questions.

Could estimate the % of fragments that are currently unplaced? I’m curious to know how much structure has been pieced together so far and what remains.

Most of the fragments (sorry don't have a %) could be mapped to a genome. In cases where a fragment could not be mapped it's more likely because of degradation than novel biology.

That said we did identify some novel microbial genomes. Not clear if they are actually ancient though vs contamination in the last 100 years or so.

I think you’re referring to DNA fragments but I actually meant text fragments. Do you know how much of the text is recovered at this point? Trying to get a sense of whether or not the full text of the scrolls is able to be read at this point or if there’s more to piece together.

If I understand correctly, you have a bunch of pieces of scrolls and it’s kind of like piecing a shredded document back together. By analyzing the DNA material of the scroll fragments, you can tell which ones should be grouped together, to help put the puzzle back together so to speak.

Is that right? Or are you mainly analyzing the DNA to find out other information about the scrolls, like where and when they may have originated?

You have the right idea. In some cases the Dead Sea Scrolls were literally shredded- ripped up into small pieces that were sold individually to tourists.

The goal here was to identify parchment fragments that came from the same animal so the original (unshredded) document could be reconstructed.

While we were able to link a lot of parchment fragments we didn't go so far as to actually reconstruct the text on those fragments. While we constrained that task somewhat it's still nontrivial since we don't know what order the fragments should go in, if there are still missing pieces, etc.

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