Palaeoproteomics in the Collins Group

My group builds upon a century-long tradition by uniting all major Nordic collections of parchment fragments to explore the significance of the medieval manuscript book in shaping Northern Europe between c. 1000 and 1500. My group  (in collaboration with our new state-of-the-art ancient proteomics platform at SDU) are applying bio-codicology to help expand the current level of knowledge with respect to medieval book production and textual practices. 

My group develops new software tools for the analysis of ancient proteins and are particularly interested in the dark proteome. Our recent publications include advancements in LAP-MALDI MS analysis for biological sex estimation from teeth and studies on minimally invasive lipid extraction techniques for parchment preservation (Vermeulen et al., 2025). We are also pioneering AI-powered, cloud-ready, and open-source tools for metaproteomics, such as Orthrus (Chiang et al., 2024), and multi-level authentication scales for ancient proteins, like Anubis (Chiang et al., 2024).