Professor Matthew Collins

BSC PHD

College position:

McDonald Chair in Palaeoproteomics

Professor Matthew James Collins
Professor Matthew James Collins

Matthew Collins, FBA is a Niels Bohr Professor at the University of Copenhagen and McDonald Professor in Palaeoproteomics at Cambridge University.

Prior to joining Cambridge he was Professor of Biomolecular Archaeology at the University of York where he founded BioArCh, a collaboration between the departments of biology, chemistry and archaeology.

His research focuses on the persistence of proteins in ancient samples, using modelling to explore the racemization of amino acids and thermal history to predict the survival of DNA and other molecules. Using a combination of approaches (including immunology and protein mass spectrometry), his research detects and interprets protein remnants in archaeological and fossil remains.

With former PhD student Mike Buckley, Professor Collins developed ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry); a method for rapidly identifying bone and other collagen-based materials using peptide mass fingerprinting.

Links to online publications, articles or other work

https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=oWhB_2oAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

Eriksen, A. M. H., Matthiesen, H., Kontopoulos, I., Gregory, D., Snoeck, C., Zhang, G., Collins, M. J., & Gilbert, M. T. P. (2020). Rapid loss of endogenous DNA in pig bone buried in five different environments. Archaeometry62(4), 827–846.

Eriksen, A. M. H., Nielsen, T. K., Matthiesen, H., Carøe, C., Hansen, L. H., Gregory, D. J., Turner-Walker, G., Collins, M. J., & Gilbert, M. T. P. (2020). Bone biodeterioration-The effect of marine and terrestrial depositional environments on early diagenesis and bone bacterial community. PloS One15(10), e0240512.

Fiddyment, S., Goodison, N. J., Brenner, E., Signorello, S., Price, K., & Collins, M. J. (2020). Girding the loins? Direct evidence of the use of a medieval parchment birthing girdle from biomolecular analysis. In Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (p. 2020.10.21.348698). https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.10.21.348698

Fourneau, M., Canon, C., Van Vlaender, D., & Collins, M. J. (2020). Histological Study of Sheep Skin Transformation in the Course of Parchment Manufacturing Processhttps://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-28808/latest.pdf

Fourneau, M., Canon, C., Van Vlaender, D., Collins, M. J., Fiddyment, S., Poumay, Y., & Deparis, O. (2020). Histological study of sheep skin transformation during the recreation of historical parchment manufacture. Heritage Science8(1), 78.

Freeman, C. L., Dieudonne, L., Collins, M. J., & Sand, K. K. (2020). Survival of environmental DNA in natural environments: Surface charge and topography of minerals as driver for DNA storage. bioRxiv. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.28.922997v1.abstract

Freeman, Dieudonné, Collins, & Sand. (2020). Survival of environmental DNA in natural environments: Surface charge and topography of minerals as driver for DNA storage. In bioRxiv (p. 2020.01.28.922997). https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.28.922997

Harris, A., Talbot, H., Collins, M., Taylor, S., Penkman, K., von Tersch, M., Rankin, L., Eriksson, G., Craig, O., Alexander, M., & Lidén, K. (2020). An improved extraction protocol for humic-contaminated bone collagen : Experimental evidence and insights from humic acid chemistryhttps://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:1462354

Hendy, J., van Doorn, N., & Collins, M. (2020). Proteomics. In Archaeological Science: An Introduction (pp. 35–69). Cambridge University Press.

Hickinbotham, S., Fiddyment, S., Stinson, T. L., & Collins, M. J. (2020). How to get your goat: automated identification of species from MALDI-ToF spectra. Bioinformatics , 1136(12), 3719–3725.

Jensen, T. Z. T., Niemann, J., Iversen, K. H., Fotakis, A. K., Gopalakrishnan, S., Vågene, Å. J., Pedersen, M. W., Sinding, M.-H. S., Ellegaard, M. R., Allentoft, M. E., Lanigan, L. T., Taurozzi, A. J., Nielsen, S. H., Dee, M. W., Mortensen, M. N., Christensen, M. C., Sørensen, S. A., Collins, M. J., Gilbert, M. T. P., … Schroeder, H. (2019). A 5700 year-old human genome and oral microbiome from chewed birch pitch. Nature Communications, 10(1), 5520.

Jensen, T. Z. T., Sjöström, A., Fischer, A., Rosengren, E., Lanigan, L. T., Bennike, O., Richter, K. K., Gron, K. J., Mackie, M., Mortensen, M. F., Sørensen, L., Chivall, D., Iversen, K. H., Taurozzi, A. J., Olsen, J., Schroeder, H., Milner, N., Sørensen, M., & Collins, M. J. (2020). An integrated analysis of Maglemose bone points reframes the Early Mesolithic of Southern Scandinavia. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 17244.

Kontopoulos, I., Penkman, K., Liritzis, I., & Collins, M. J. (2019). Bone diagenesis in a Mycenaean secondary burial (Kastrouli, Greece). Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 11(10), 5213–5230.

Kontopoulos, I., Penkman, K., Mullin, V. E., Winkelbach, L., Unterländer, M., Scheu, A., Kreutzer, S., Hansen, H. B., Margaryan, A., Teasdale, M. D., Gehlen, B., Street, M., Lynnerup, N., Liritzis, I., Sampson, A., Papageorgopoulou, C., Allentoft, M. E., Burger, J., Bradley, D. G., & Collins, M. J. (2020). Screening archaeological bone for palaeogenetic and palaeoproteomic studies. PloS One, 15(6), e0235146.

Korzow Richter, K., McGrath, K., Masson-MacLean, E., Hickinbotham, S., Tedder, A., Britton, K., Bottomley, Z., Dobney, K., Hulme-Beaman, A., Zona, M., Fischer, R., Collins, M. J., & Speller, C. F. (2020). What’s the catch? Archaeological application of rapid collagen-based species identification for Pacific Salmon. Journal of Archaeological Science, 116, 105116.

Lanigan, L. T., Mackie, M., Feine, S., Hublin, J.-J., Schmitz, R. W., Wilcke, A., Collins, M. J., Cappellini, E., Olsen, J. V., Taurozzi, A. J., & Welker, F. (2020). Multi-protease analysis of Pleistocene bone proteomes. Journal of Proteomics, 103889.

Macleod, R., Sinding, M.-H. S., Olsen, M. T., Collins, M. J., & Rowland, S. J. (2020). DNA preserved in jetsam whale ambergris. Biology Letters, 16(2), 20190819.

McGrath, K., Rowsell, K., Gates St-Pierre, C., Tedder, A., Foody, G., Roberts, C., Speller, C., & Collins, M. (2019). Identifying Archaeological Bone via Non-Destructive ZooMS and the Materiality of Symbolic Expression: Examples from Iroquoian Bone Points. Scientific Reports, 9(1), 11027.

Presslee, S., Slater, G. J., Pujos, F., Forasiepi, A. M., Fischer, R., Molloy, K., Mackie, M., Olsen, J. V., Kramarz, A., Taglioretti, M., Scaglia, F., Lezcano, M., Lanata, J. L., Southon, J., Feranec, R., Bloch, J., Hajduk, A., Martin, F. M., Salas Gismondi, R., … MacPhee, R. D. E. (2019). Palaeoproteomics resolves sloth relationships. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 3(7), 1121–1130.

Ramsøe, A., van Heekeren, V., Ponce, P., Fischer, R., Barnes, I., Speller, C., & Collins, M. J. (2020). DeamiDATE 1.0: Site-specific deamidation as a tool to assess authenticity of members of ancient proteomes. Journal of Archaeological Science, 115, 105080.

Ryder, C. M., Sponheimer, M., Shokry, H., Lazagabaster, I. A., Marom, N., Monnier, G. F., Collins, M. J., Deviese, T., & Higham, T. (2020). Saving Bones: a direct comparison of FTIR-ATR, whole bone percent nitrogen, and NIR.

Scott, A. B., Taurozzi, A. J., Hughes, N., Pedersen, D. D., Kontopoulos, I., Mackie, M., & Collins, M. J. (2020). Comparing biological and pathological factors affecting osteocalcin concentrations in archaeological skeletal remains. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 34, 102573.

Simpson, J. P., Fascione, M., Bergström, E., Wilson, J., Collins, M. J., Penkman, K. E. H., & Thomas-Oates, J. (2019). Ionisation bias undermines the use of matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionisation for estimating peptide deamidation: Synthetic peptide studies demonstrate electrospray ionisation gives more reliable response ratios. Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry: RCM, 33(12), 1049–1057.

Trolle Jensen, T. Z., Mackie, M., Taurozzi, A. J., Lanigan, L. T., Gundelach, C., Olsen, J., Sørensen, S. A., Collins, M. J., Sørensen, M., & Schroeder, H. (2020). The biomolecular characterization of a finger ring contextually dated to the emergence of the Early Neolithic from Syltholm, Denmark. Royal Society Open Science, 7(1), 191172.

Verdugo, M. P., Mullin, V. E., Scheu, A., Mattiangeli, V., Daly, K. G., Maisano Delser, P., Hare, A. J., Burger, J., Collins, M. J., Kehati, R., Hesse, P., Fulton, D., Sauer, E. W., Mohaseb, F. A., Davoudi, H., Khazaeli, R., Lhuillier, J., Rapin, C., Ebrahimi, S., … Bradley, D. G. (2019). Ancient cattle genomics, origins, and rapid turnover in the Fertile Crescent. Science, 365(6449), 173–176.

Welker, F., Ramos-Madrigal, J., Kuhlwilm, M., Liao, W., Gutenbrunner, P., de Manuel, M., Samodova, D., Mackie, M., Allentoft, M. E., Bacon, A.-M., Collins, M. J., Cox, J., Lalueza-Fox, C., Olsen, J. V., Demeter, F., Wang, W., Marques-Bonet, T., & Cappellini, E. (2019). Enamel proteome shows that Gigantopithecus was an early diverging pongine. Nature, 576(7786), 262–265.

Charlton, S., Ramsøe, A., Collins, M., Craig, O. E., Fischer, R., Alexander, M., & Speller, C. F. (2019). New insights into Neolithic milk consumption through proteomic analysis of dental calculus. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 11(11), 6183–6196.

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