Rhonda K. Roby

The paper develops a minimally invasive workflow to recover biological signatures from Renaissance-era artifacts, revealing microbial biomes and Y-chromosome markers linked to historical handling and conservation.

The paper compares sampling techniques for microbial DNA recovery from artworks on paper, finding wet vacuuming yields higher DNA recovery than other methods.

The paper addresses criticisms of a previous study on identifying individuals from whole-genome sequencing data by demonstrating the limitations of Erlich's simulation and highlighting the algorithm's use of multiple trait-based predictive models.