“Q&A: Metropolitan Museum of Art's Julie Arslanoglu on Proteomics in Art History and Conservation” |
| Q&A: Metropolitan Museum of Art's Julie Arslanoglu on Proteomics in Art History and Conservation Posted: 05 Nov 2010 11:00 AM PDT Name: Julie Arslanoglu Julie Arslanoglu is an associate research scientist in the department of scientific research at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she collaborates with the museum's curators and conservators and conducts research on immunological and mass spectrometric techniques useful in the study of artwork. Recently she received a three-year, $420,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study techniques including ELISA and mass spectrometry for detecting, identifying, and localizing proteins in pieces of art with the goal of aiding conservation and authentication efforts. This week she spoke to ProteoMonitor about her work at the museum, her plans for the NSF grant, and the general use of proteomics as a tool in art history and conservation. The following is an edited version of the interview. What are the main aims of the proteomics work you do at the museum? The most important purpose is technical art history – to understand how a piece is made. One of the aspects of art is that often it's not just [composed of] one straightforward component. We see that in egg tempera where artists started to add oil as a transition to oil painting in Italy in the mid 1500s to 1600s. There are other cases where you might have the addition of gum binder to casein-based paint to create a particular effect. So to have the ability to take a single sample and screen it for three proteins and two gums and to be able to say that this paint is a mixture of, say, casein and gum – the idea of getting correct technical information about how something is made is important. For us everything that we do starts with the question of, 'Why does this piece of art look the way that it does? Why is it flaking? Why is it behaving the way it does?' Getting that kind of information about what the art is made of to help the conservators make correct conservation decisions; to help conservators and curators make decisions on what's the best display or storage for this artwork. 'Should it travel? How do we store it?' That's the most important thing we do. What sort of techniques do you use in your work? While we have FT-IR and GC-MS analysis techniques for protein and gum identification, at the Met we decided initially to investigate an immunological approach. This approach has been done in the past, but there's been a resurgence of interest, mainly because the specificity of the antibodies available commercially has increased in our area of interest, and also the cost has come down. It's a colorimetric assay, and it's something that you can do in a museum laboratory. At the same time, there's been a surge of people working in the proteomics field using either MALDI-TOF or LC-ESI-QTOF to look at peptides in art materials to identify the proteins that are there. That's definitely a very strong area of research that's going on. There are several labs doing that throughout the world. One lab in particular is at Harvard, the Straus Center [for Conservation and Technical Studies], where Dan Kirby is doing research trying to make this [MALDI-TOF] approach more of a benchtop approach. He and I are working together because we saw that there was this complementary nature between the peptides that will be stable that you can identify using proteomics, and how you could go about exploiting that information to increase the specificity and reliability and reproducibility of your ELISA assays. When did people begin using proteomics approaches to study art? With immunological techniques the earliest attempts were in the 70s, and in archaeological work they've been very successful. So that was something that we as a group of scientists started to look at again. The [mass spec-based] proteomics came into it when around 2002 laboratories that did proteomics got involved in the cultural heritage field. They already have access to these large databases of amino acid sequences and peptide sequences, and they're able to do either the peptide analysis using a mass fingerprinting technique or even sequencing using some sort of LC-MS technique. So as that information becomes more concrete and more accessible to us in the art research area, we're looking to try to bring it in at a museum level. So you're taking the research these larger proteomics labs have done and applying it to your work at the museum? Exactly. They are people with real expertise in this who are doing the kind of basic research that you need to have. You need a good instrument and good people and a lot of time, and usually we don't have the time or the money or the instrumentation, so this is very useful to us. Who are the labs that are doing this sort of basic research? Most of them are academic. Usually what happens – in Europe, and we're trying to do more of it here – is that there's a cultural application and somebody in the cultural field makes a contact with somebody in the academic field, or even, if you're lucky, industry, and there's enough interest to do a small project, and if there's enough success it develops into a larger project. That's what you hope for, to have someone who has the time, the instrumentation, the money, and the personnel to be able to do the basic type [of] research that we can then incorporate into what we do. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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