Dr Mike Buckley - personal details

I completed a NERC-funded PhD entitled ‘Species identification in ancient and degraded bone fragments using protein mass spectrometry’ in the Department of Biology, University of York which initially focussed on sequencing the small non-collagenous bone protein osteocalcin by LC-ESI-qTOF-MS and LC-MALDI-TOF-TOF-MS. I then re-directed this research to the study of bone collagen (I), because of its greater persistence in fossilised remains, and developed ZooMS (‘Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry’), in which collagen peptides are fractionated by SPE and fingerprinted using MALDI-TOF-MS. Typical archaeological applications are to distinguish between morphologically-similar taxa such as the caprine species, sheep and goats, or the identification of taxa in limited but highly assemblages spanning much of the Pleistocene. During my postdoctoral research I refined this methodology to work on other collagen-based samples, ranging from mummified skin and leathers, meat and bone meal and gelatine-containing food products, as well as other mineralised tissues such as ostrich eggshell.

In 2010 I moved to the Faculty of Life Sciences here at the University of Manchester to take up a NERC-funded postdoctoral research fellowship on the assessment of biodiversity in Pleistocene Britain through comprehensive small-scale microsampling of vertebrate fossil remains.