Oxford Nanopore Technologies for Biocodicology: a case study on a 15th-century parchment - Vassallo Y., Waldherr M., Lehner E., Graf A., Cappa F., Hartl A., Schober R., Beccaccioli M., Sterflinger K., Piñar G., Reverberi M.

Biocodicology, a term coined by Sarah Fiddyment in 2019, is an emerging field which studies the biological information stored in manuscripts: fungi/bacteria that colonise and degrade the surface (microbiome), and the animal species used for the manufacturing of the parchment, to better understand the production and the history of the artefact. The analyses usually used for the identification of the animal are: visual analysis, protein analysis, or DNA analysis. In this field Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) and in particular their portable device MinION it’s a great instrument to investigate the DNA of the microbiome of cultural artefacts, but so far it has never been used to study the microbiome and the animal species of parchment. Animal DNA found in ancient parchment manuscripts can be considered ancient DNA (aDNA), as it's characterised by short (40-200 bp) fragments and can have different mutations, therefore, until now the sequencing technology used has been Illumina (short-read sequencing). The portable device MinION (ONT) on the other hand, it’s a long-read sequencer, but last year Nanopore released a new Short Fragmented Mode (SFM) and a new chemistry of the flowcell (R10.4.1) which makes it potentially usable for sequencing short fragments. In this case study we report for the first time the potential of MinION (ONT) for the identification of the animal species (aDNA) and the microbiome of a 15th-century parchment from the Graphic Collection (Kupferstichkabinett) of the Academy of Fine Arts, in Vienna. The results show the feasibility of this technology for this type of studies.