Analysis of the Bronze Age Heslington Brain by FTIR Imaging and Hierarchical Cluster AnalysisFTIR has over the past years proven to be a technique capable of discriminating between different tissue structures. Herein we report the preliminary analysis of Heslington brain tissue by FTIR imaging and Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA). Analysis of the average spectra for the different clusters showed bands that are characteristic of proteins and lipids, indicating that these were still present in the tissue. Comparison with spectra obtained by Kraft et al.1 for normal brain tissue that had been snap frozen in liquid nitrogen immediately after post-mortem resection, showed the absence of the C=O lipid stretching band in the spectra from the Heslington brain and a broad spread of absorbance in the region between 1000 to 1350cm-1, which might be due to the degradation of the tissue.Four different areas of tissue were identified from the Hierarchical Cluster Analysis. However, analysis of the average spectra for those areas showed that there was little difference between three of them. The fourth area, related to three small areas at the edge of the tissue analysed, varied significantly from the other three areas, in that it had lower absorbance in the amide bands and in the 1140 to 1430 cm-1 region and it exhibited much higher absorbance in the 1000 to 1140 cm-1 region with maxima at 1120 and 1038 cm-1. Absorption bands around 1120 cm-1 have been associated with RNA2 and bands around 1044 cm-1 have been attributed to the phosphate monoester asymmetric P-O stretch.3 The region between 1000 and 1140 cm-1 is also associated with glycogen and collagen. However, it is not possible to say which type of molecules these observed bands can be attributed to without further analysis. 1 C. Krafft, L. Shapoval, S. B. Sobottka, K. D. Geiger, G. Schackert and R. Salzer, Biochimica et Biophysica Acta - Biomembranes, 2006, 1758, 883-891.2 E. Gazi, J. Dwyer, P. Gardner, A. Ghanbari-Siahkali, A. P. Wade, J. Miyan, N. P. Lockyer, J. C. Vickerman, N. W. Clarke, J. H. Shanks, L. J. Scott, C. A. Hart and M. Brown, Journal of Pathology, 2003, 201, 99-108.3 P. S. Bromberg, K. M. Gough, M. Ogg, M. R. Del Bigio and R. Julian (1999) in Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering, Vol. 3775, pp. 118-126
