The aim of my
research is to develop novel models and software tools for the analysis of mass-spectrometric
data from degraded and ancient proteins.
Bone collagen is arguably the most important protein for
archaeologists. Used for radiocarbon dating, stable isotope analysis. A number of researchers have claimed that collagen can be found in very
old bone samples, including dinosaurs by direct sequencing of bone extracts by
protein mass-spectrometry.
Mass-spectrometry database searching, is based principally on
pattern recognition. If the expected sequence of peptides is not in the
database the pattern will not be matched. Unfortunately in the case of collagen
there are very few sequences in the database, including many species important
in archaeology. In archaeological samples the problem is made worse by
diagenetic change.
My project is to develop novel approaches to solve the above problems. Collagen pattern recognition and PTM pattern recognition approaches have applied to mass-spectrometry data. And UniColl, a hypothetical collagen database was built to identify ancient collagens.
