While we're talking about said protein, has the dispute over its true nature been cleared up?
Nothing new on this has been released in at least two years. Since it was discovered in 2003 and been discredited by like 27 scientist I don't think it is valid. It just shows to what extent some will go to prove dinosaurs are birds.
www.wired.com/medtech/genetics/magazine/17-07/ff_originofspecies?currentPage=1Fresh doubts over T. rex chicken link
Critics call on researchers to disclose protein spectra data.
Rex Dalton
T. rexCritiques of a Tyrannosaurus rex study on protein from its femur
bone (below) have been as fierce as the dinosaur.L. Psihoyos/Corbis
E. Lamm/Museum of the Rockies
A claim by researchers to have extracted proteins from a Tyrannosaurus
rex bone and matched these to proteins found in chickens has been
attacked in the same journal that published the original research.
In a withering critique, computational biologist Pavel Pevzner and his
colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, say that the
protein claim cannot be supported by the analytical data released so
far1.
The original articles, published last year in Science, claimed that
palaeontologist Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University in
Raleigh and her colleagues had recovered fragments of collagen from
inside a 68-million-year-old T. rex femur bone2 — making the protein
100 times older than the previous collagen record holder, from a
mastodon (Mammut americanum) that died up to 600,000 years ago.
A linked article described the analyses of the T. rex protein samples
performed by John Asara, who runs a mass spectrometry research lab at
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, and his
colleagues. Asara was able to match sequences from all the collagen
fragments to those of living species including chickens, better
defining the evolutionary link between reptiles and birds3.
But Pevzner calls the article "computationally illiterate". He argues
that the mass spectrometry data on the seven proteins recovered are
not broad enough to prove a statistically significant match with
chicken collagen. Because Asara's team has not revealed all the 48,000
mass spectra data generated, he says, it is impossible to rule out the
'false positives' that are routinely generated by the technique, and
so tell whether the protein match is a mere coincidence like "a monkey
typing random keys on a typewriter" that by chance spells words.
Spectra of all studied proteins are routinely published as
supplementary data to enable scientists to replicate results, but
Asara declines to release this data, saying that to do so would open
the work to publication by others.
"I'm surprised; I don't understand how they went forward and published
unless those data were publicly disclosed," says Richard Smith, head
of the mass spectrometry lab at the Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory in Richland, Washington.
Asara, whose rebuttal to the Pevzner critique appears in the same
issue4, says his team conducted additional analyses that support their
earlier results. "After being forced to go through evaluation of the
data, we stand by the article even more so today," he says.
Asara's confidence belies the article's increasing troubles. The
researchers withdrew one protein from the work as far back as
September 2007, saying that it wasn't statistically significant5.
Next, in January, Science published a technical comment on the
article6, in which 27 authors reported that they could not verify the
T. rex proteins, to which Asara and Schweitzer again replied7.
By June, Asara was publicly acknowledging that two other proteins were
also not statistically significant. This, despite a short article in
Science8 a month earlier, in which Asara, Schweitzer and their
colleagues asserted that a comparison of the ancient proteins to
existing species — such as crocodile and ostrich — helped to affirm
their earlier work.
Even the T. rex protein samples have been questioned. On 30 July, Tom
Kaye, a research associate at the Burke Museum of Natural History and
Culture in Seattle, Washington, asserted that the collagen extracted
from the ancient bone was in fact remnants of bacterial slime9.
Schweitzer told Nature that she rejects the evidence, from scanning
electron microscope images, because it came from other bones — Kaye
says that his team was denied access to the original bone.
With the controversy over their original article unabated, Schweitzer
says that she will hold a private meeting in November with invited
scientific authorities to develop additional standards for publishing
such work. But Pevzner is looking for a different response. "How many
technical comments should there be before an article is withdrawn?" he
says.