Faecal biomarkers can distinguish specific mammalian species in modern and past environments

Loïc Harrault; Karen Milek; Emilie Jarde; Laurent Jeanneau; Morgane Derrien; David George Anderson

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0211119

Faecal biomarkers can distinguish specific mammalian species in modern and past environments

Loïc Harrault^* (Corresponding Author), Karen Milek, Emilie Jarde, Laurent Jeanneau, Morgane Derrien, David George Anderson

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

68 Citations (Scopus)

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Abstract

Identifying the presence of animals based on faecal deposits in modern and ancient environments is of primary importance to archaeologists, ecologists, forensic scientists, and watershed managers, but it has proven difficult to distinguish faecal material to the species level. Until now, four 5β-stanols have been deployed as faecal biomarkers to distinguish between omnivores and herbivores, but they cannot distinguish between species. Here we present a database of faecal signatures from ten omnivore and herbivore species based on eleven 5β-stanol compounds, which enables us to distinguish for the first time the faecal signatures of a wide range of animals. We validated this fingerprinting method by testing it on modern and ancient soil samples containing known faecal inputs and successfully distinguished the signatures of different omnivores and herbivores.

Original language	English
Article number	e0211119
Journal	PloS ONE
Volume	14
Issue number	2
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0211119
Publication status	Published - 7 Feb 2019

Bibliographical note

This research is part of the HUMANOR project funded by the JPI Climate Consortium by the Economic and Social Reasearch Council (ESRC, ES/M011054/1) obtained by D. A. and K. M. and by the European Reasearch Council (ERC) Advanced Grant 295458 Arctic Domus obtained by D. A., both based at the University of Aberdeen. ESRC: https://esrc.ukri.org/ ERC: https://erc.europa.eu/ The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files.

Keywords

ORGANIC-MATTER SOURCES
LIPID BIOMARKERS
TOFTS NESS
STEROLS
CONTAMINATION
STANOLS
ORIGIN
COPROSTANOL
MARKERS
SOIL

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10.1371/journal.pone.0211119Licence: CC BY

Faecal biomarkers can distinguish specific mammalian species in modern and past environments
© 2019 Harrault et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Final published version, 6.45 MBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

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Faecal biomarkers can distinguish specific mammalian species in modern and past environments

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

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