I think you should definitely contact her for professional meeting (and then ask about Sophie possibly meeting with her and learning)
On Sun, Feb 1, 2026 at 5:40 PM Mark Gerstein <mark> wrote:
QT: {{"
The hunt for Leonardo’s DNA has been a high-profile proving ground for
“arteomics,” an emerging field that could transform how the art world
authenticates and protects its most precious objects (see sidebar,
below). Today, authorship decisions hinge on expert opinion on, for
example, how a brushstroke was made. “Connoisseurship is still what
counts,” says LDVP chair Jesse Ausubel, an environmental scientist at
Rockefeller University who previously led a major project to census
the diversity of marine life.
…
With human Y chromosome and other nuclear DNA sequences from both the
drawing and the letters in hand, the LDVP team approached Lee, a Y
chromosome expert, in late 2024. Lee was intrigued, and LDVP sent him
blinded sequence data from swabs of Holy Child, several Frosino
letters, and the cheeks of the scientists who sampled the materials.
….
Lee, Loftus, and Jackson geneticist Pille Hallast compared the
sequences with a panel of some 90,000 known markers—changes in
individual base pairs—that group Y chromosome sequences into lineages
called haplogroups. Four samples from Holy Child and the Frosino
letters could be reliably assigned a haplogroup—and they all converged
on E1b1b, a lineage found in the Tuscany area that Leonardo’s extended
family might have carried.
….
When Andrew Miranker peers at a Blakelock canvas, he sees more than
brushwork and varnish. He sees a molecular archive. “Paint is a
recording device,” says Miranker, a biophysicist at Yale University.
As oil paint slowly cures, it traps fragments of DNA—human, animal,
microbial—along with the dust and air of a studio. By interrogating
vanishingly small samples of the strata on supposed Blakelock
canvases, Miranker’s team hopes to uncover clues to whether they were
done by the artist himself or a clever forger.
….
For instance, minuscule paint flakes from an oil painting of a family
farmhouse by John Fairbanks, an American artist from the turn of the
20th century, yielded genetic signatures of farm animals, a dog, and
regional crops such as wheat and clover.
…
DNA often gets star billing, but proteins can also be telling, says
Julie Arslanoglu, an organic chemist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
who co-founded Art Bio Matters, an international consortium decoding
molecular signatures in art.
…
She and University of Bordeaux analytical chemist Caroline Tokarski, a
pioneer in applying proteomic analysis to artworks, probed a
long-standing puzzle about 18th century English artist Thomas
Gainsborough. …. In 1773, Gainsborough wrote to a friend describing
a “secret recipe” for preventing smoke’s dimming effects: He dipped
drawings in skim milk.
…
To test that claim, the Met-Bordeaux team analyzed rubbings from
Gainsborough drawings in the Morgan Library & Museum. Their results,
published in Heritage Science in 2020, confirmed the legend: The
coating on Gainsborough’s sketches, including Hilly Landscape with
Cows on the Road, contained bovine milk proteins, especially casein.
But exactly how the artist applied the skim milk—and why it
helped—remains a riddle."}}
https://www.science.org/content/article/have-scientists-found-leonardo-da-vinci-s-dna
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