Dog and cat DNA, peanut and maize DNA, and traces of Mediterranean red coral turned up when an Italian-led team sequenced the dust and threads collected from the Shroud of Turin in 1978. The result, published in Scientific Reports, reads like a shopping list for a cloth that believers associate with Jesus’s burial. The authors say plainly that none of it settles how old the linen is or whether it is authentic.
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The paper, “DNA signatures preserved in the official 1978 sample collection of the Shroud of Turin,” was led by Gianni Barcaccia and involved 19 researchers, including Noemi Procopio, Antonio Torroni and Alessandro Achilli. Procopio is a professor of forensic science at the University of Lancashire. ScienceDaily carried the University of Lancashire’s press release again on Nov. 8, months after the study first appeared.
Twelve samples from 1978 and a PCR-free sequencing method
According to the published paper, 12 samples were collected in 1978 by the late Pierluigi Baima Bollone: seven glass tubes of linen filaments, four jars of vacuum dust, one of them empty, and one microscope slide holding a tiny biological fragment. DNA was extracted in clean rooms with a method suited to degraded material and read with shotgun sequencing on Illumina platforms. The university’s release calls it the first use of PCR-free metagenomic sequencing, which detects DNA from many species at once, on the officially collected samples.
The paper itself, registered under a Scientific Reports DOI, was received on March 25 and accepted on June 30, 2026, and the first press release went out on Aug. 4.
Dogs, cats, peanuts and red coral among the non-human reads
The plant list in the August release is wheat, carrots, maize, bananas and peanuts. The animal list is cattle, pigs, chickens, dogs and cats, plus DNA associated with Mediterranean red coral, which the release calls unusual. Figures in the paper put wheat at about 11.6 percent of assigned contigs, dog and cat at roughly 22.1 and 21.7 percent, and red coral at about 33.3 percent of the animal signal, with peanut strongly present in one sample. Microbes ran from skin-associated bacteria to molds and salt-loving archaea, which may reflect salt storage or flax processing, an idea Earth.com raised in its coverage.
Human DNA came in several maternal lineages. One matched the collector’s own mitochondrial genome, and the authors attribute the mixed signals to handling by many people. Procopio said the Shroud is a rich archive of genetic information accumulated over centuries, a point the authors treat as a record of handling, storage and transport rather than of origin. The samples were collected almost 50 years ago, and she noted that newer forensic DNA methods were applied to them.
Earth.com’s reading of the plant data shows why the authors urge caution. Carrot made up nearly a third of plant reads, and its closest matches were orange carrot varieties bred in Western Europe in the 1400s and 1500s, which would point to contamination no older than the late Middle Ages. Maize, peanuts, peppers, tomatoes and potatoes, all native to the Americas, also appeared, an outcome the authors call a puzzle for a cloth claimed to be 2,000 years old. Baima Bollone, who gathered the samples, died in November 2025 and is listed as a co-author, and three clean human profiles matched his own DNA, evidence of how easily a collector’s traces enter the material he collects.
Modern contamination and the limits of the evidence
The caveats are heavy. The authors report clear modern contamination signatures, which they attribute to handling. Plant and animal reads showed no detectable deamination, the chemical damage typical of ancient DNA, so they may not be ancient, and a protein analysis found no ancient peptides, only keratins and other handling-related proteins. Reference databases were limited, and some classifications were uncertain. Earth.com notes the plant comparison used a library of only 126 species.
The authors also state that metagenomics could not establish whether the cloth is medieval or about two millennia old. Radiocarbon dating in the paper covers only two repair threads, which matched repairs made in 1534 and 1694, not the linen itself. Procopio said the DNA evidence cannot answer all the questions about the cloth’s age or authenticity, and the release adds that a species’ DNA does not show when it reached the cloth.
A separate 1988 radiocarbon test dated the linen to 1260-1390, a result that supporters of an older origin dispute on statistical grounds, according to Earth.com. The new study neither confirms nor overturns it. The authors add that the cloth has been handled and exposed to different environments for centuries, so any original DNA cannot be reliably separated from later deposits, and detecting a species says nothing about when that species’ DNA arrived. Whether coral and peanut DNA reflect a pilgrim’s souvenir, a storage jar or later laboratory handling is a question the authors leave open, and SciTechDaily’s summary likewise ties the traces to handling, storage and transport across regions over time.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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