Amino acid dating

Amino acid dating is a dating technique used to estimate the age of a specimen in paleobiology, molecular paleontology, archaeology, forensic science, taphonomy, sedimentary geology and other fields. This technique relates changes in amino acid molecules to the time elapsed since they were formed.

All biological tissues contain amino acids. All amino acids except glycine (the simplest one) are optically active, having a stereocenter at their α-C atom. This means that the amino acid can have two different configurations, "D" or "L" which are mirror images of each other. With a few important exceptions, living organisms keep all their amino acids in the "L" configuration. When an organism dies, control over the configuration of the amino acids ceases, and the ratio of D to L moves from a value near 0 towards an equilibrium value near 1, a process called racemization. Thus, measuring the ratio of D to L in a sample enables one to estimate how long ago the specimen died.

The rate at which racemization proceeds depends on the type of amino acid and on the average temperature, humidity, acidity (pH), and other characteristics of the enclosing matrix. Also, D/L concentration thresholds appear to occur as sudden decreases in the rate of racemization. These effects restrict amino acid chronologies to materials with known environmental histories and/or relative intercomparisons with other dating methods.

Temperature and humidity histories of microenvironments are being produced at ever increasing rates as technologies advance and technologists accumulate data. These are important for amino acid dating because racemization occurs much faster in warm, wet conditions compared to cold, dry conditions. Temperate to cold region studies are much more common than tropical studies, and the steady cold of the ocean floor or the dry interior of bones and shells have contributed most to the accumulation of racemization dating data. As a rule of thumb, sites with a mean annual temperature of 30°C have a maximum range of 200 ka and resolution of about 10 ka; sites at 10°C have a maximum age range of ~2 m.y., and resolution generally about 20% of the age; at -10°C the reaction has a maximum age of ~10 m.y., and a correspondingly coarser resolution.

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