In the past years several ageing studies have been reported, which were mainly dealing with the effect of temperature on the degradation of parchment. In contrary, less studies focused on the impact of relative humidity and atmospheric pollutants, or changes occurring due to the combination of these environmental effects. The proposed project will test the influence of the main pollutants present in our atmosphere: SO2, NOx and O3. In order to retrace their impact on the proteinaceous material as detailed as possible, the pollutants will be applied separately and after preliminary UV and temperature ageing as well as in combination with different degrees of moisture. Additionally, the influence of iron gall ink on the degradation of parchment will be carefully evaluated, as most of the so far performed studies were focused on the degradation of the ink but not on the proteinaceous writing support. 

Besides implementing state-of-the-art methodologies as described above to study the degradation of parchment (i.e. FTIR, Raman, UV/Vis spectroscopy, MHT method, SEM-EDX and qAAA), this project will put a special focus on the characterization of collagen modifications occurring during degradation, which will innovatively be assessed in a proteomics-like approaches. Since parchment is a highly heterogeneous material, the combination of molecular imaging methods like MALDI MSI, FTIR and Raman imaging, will give a comprehensive view on underlying chemical processes especially when combined with elemental information coming from SEM-EDX mapping.