Biocodicology - A Deeper Dive

[Mark Knowles]

As I already said, if we have single author who spent his life on the VM there would likely be a lot of DNA from that person. By sheer amount the chance of getting something readable increases. At least a little bit.

By the way, did scribes touch the parchment with their palm during writing or was this avoided? This would leave a lot more DNA that the average reader. I'd stay away from corners for this very reason if you are interested in the author(s). The ideal sampling spot on a bifolio would be where the scribe touches the surface for a prolonged time while a reader is unlikely to do so.

I absolutely agree with you that the key is selecting where in the manuscript to take the samples from. This should be places where the scribe left as much DNA as possible and where other later readers would have left little or no DNA and where the DNA would have been best preserved. Hopefully this should result in samples with a significant amount of intact scribal DNA for sequencing and little or no other DNA. Selecting these "sites" where very small samples such that they don't damage the manuscript would be taken from would require real thought and careful inspection of the digitised scans of the Voynich manuscript to identify the best spots.

What do you think about DNA in the ink? Is it more likely to be preserved or destroyed there relative to on the parchment? It would seem to me that such DNA would be deposited before the ink is dry and so will exclude DNA from a later period.