Potenzialità della metagenomica per la conservazione dei beni culturali

This paper focuses on the last generation methods for the characterization of biodeteriogens on historical artifacts. New "culture-independent" technologies based on DNA obtained from environmental samples, which have replaced the previous culture-dependent methods, are experiencing a real boom and revolutionized the field of microbial ecology. These methods are based conceptually on metagenomics and, technically, on the so-called NGS (Next-Generation Sequencing) technologies. Metagenomic analysis is defined as the direct genetic analysis of genomes contained in an environmental sample. The NGS technologies are characterized by a power and depth of sequencing totally unthinkable a few years ago and allow the identification also of the rarest species in a community. Even in their simplest declination, that is, the NGS sequencing of amplicons obtained with universal primers, the amount of data generated ranges from hundreds to thousands (for the Roche technology) in the millions-hundreds of millions (for the Illumina platforms).