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

Harrault, Loïc; Milek, Karen; Jardé, Emilie; Jeanneau, Laurent; Derrien, Morgane; Anderson, David

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0211119

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

Harrault, Loïc; Milek, Karen; Jardé, Emilie; Jeanneau, Laurent; Derrien, Morgane; Anderson, David

Authors

Loïc Harrault

Professor Karen Milek karen.b.milek@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Emilie Jardé

Laurent Jeanneau

Morgane Derrien

David Anderson

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 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.

Citation

Harrault, L., Milek, K., Jardé, E., Jeanneau, L., Derrien, M., & Anderson, D. (2019). Faecal biomarkers can distinguish specific mammalian species in modern and past environments. PLoS ONE, 14(2), Article e0211119. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0211119

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Jan 16, 2019
Online Publication Date	Feb 7, 2019
Publication Date	Feb 7, 2019
Deposit Date	Nov 16, 2018
Publicly Available Date	Feb 20, 2019
Journal	PLoS ONE
Publisher	Public Library of Science
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	14
Issue	2
Article Number	e0211119
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0211119

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Copyright Statement
Copyright: © 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.