The Silk Road, Marco Polo, a bible and its proteome: A detective story

Around the end of XIII century (at the time of young Marco Polo's first trip to China at the court of Khubilai Khan in Khan Baliq) a pocket Bible was delivered by a Franciscan friar to the Mogul Emperor, in the framework of the evangelization program of the Far East. Four centuries later, in 1685, this Bible was rediscovered by the Jesuit Philippe Couplet in the house of a rich Chinese in Nanchin and donated to Cosimo III, Grand Duke of Tuscany. This Bible was recently “unearthed” in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, wrapped up in a precious yellow silk cloth, in a rather ruined state. After two years of restoration, the Bible will return to China in 2012 for a celebration of its > 700 years of life and of its remarkable return trip on the Silk Road. On account of the thinness of the parchment (barely 80 μm thickness, the size of each foil being 16.5 × 11 cm) it was widely held that the pages were produced from foetal lambskins. On tiny fragments of the margins of a foil, after several unsuccessful attempts at digesting the vellum, we were able to obtain a tryptic peptide mixture, which, upon mass spectrometry analysis, yielded the identity of 8 unique proteins, belonging to the genus Bos taurus, thus confirming the origin of the vellum from calfskins rather than from foetal lambskins. Our results prove that it is possible to obtain reliable protein extraction and IDs from ancient parchment documents.

You do not have to break your back on a camel back on a two-year journey on the Silk Road to reach Khan Baliq and meet Khubilai Khan. Just read this wondrous story inside!Figure optionsDownload high-quality image (663 K)Download as PowerPoint slideHighlights
► A tribute to Khubilai Khan, the “Lorenzo il Magnifico” of Khan Baliq (Xanadu).
► A tribute to Khan Baliq and Xanadu, rivalling Venice in splendour.
► A Tribute to Marco Polo, definitely not the “Grand Liar”.
► A tribute to the Sorbonne and its 10,000 Bibles de poche.
► Chapeau to the amanuenses of Middle Ages.