Protein sequence comparison of human and non-human primate tooth proteomes

In the context of human evolution, the study of proteins may overcome the limitation of the high degradation of ancient DNA over time for providing biomolecular information useful to precise the phylogeny of hominid taxa. Here, we have analysed and compared the tooth proteome of five extant primates (human, gorilla, chimpanzee, orangutan and baboon) using a shotgun proteomics approach. Twenty five proteins were shared by the five datasets, and may be considered as the most representative tooth proteins with a chance of being retrieved from older samples. Some of them were identified by peptides specific to the species, thus allowing to draw up a combinatory panel of peptides with species signature that could be helpful for the taxonomic characterization of ancient samples