Prof. Reznikov co-authors Nature paper on metabolites preserved in fossil bones

In a recent Nature publication, Profs. Natalie Reznikov and Marc McKee, along with graduate students Eran Ittah and Daniel Buss, worked with Prof. Timothy Bromage of New York University and other collaborators to provide a comprehensive palaeometabolome from diverse prehistoric mammalian fossils (1-3 million years old) that document the preservation of metabolites in animal fossil bones.  Through the use of primarily electron microscopy, the four McGill University authors contributed to the work by describing how and where such small metabolites can be harboured and preserved in bone tissue. The findings of this study provide a detailed glimpse into organismal well-being and ecology of those times.  Such a palaeometabolome recovered from a fossilized bone or tooth is not like the instantaneous metabolome that one could immediately retrieve today from an individual’s collected biofluid (such as blood, urine, or saliva), but instead requires that metabolites become stochastically trapped and preserved in distinct mineral crystallite niches during hard tissue formation.

The article may be found here at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09843-w