Proteomic method for determination of animal hair fibres

The market of high quality textiles requires suitable analytical methods for the determination of their fiber composition to guarantee that no falsification occurs. The proteomic method, developed in recent years and based on the ultra-performance liquid chromatography coupled with electrospray mass spectrometry (LC/ESI-MS), was successfully used for the identification and quantification of the most commercial Bovidae fibres (wool, cashmere and yak). This is possible because keratin from sheep, cashmere goat and yak are similar but not identical. Indeed, in some specific parts of the protein there are amino acidic variants that can be used as specific peptide-marker to distinguish each animal fibers. In this paper, the proteomic method was applied to other animal hair fibers, such as Camel, Lama, Alpaca, Vicuna and Guanaco, in order to identify new molecular markers to discriminate Camelidae from Bovidae. Preliminary results showed that there are specific molecular markers for Camelidae and for Bovidae, suitable both for qualitative and quantitative analysis.