11 June 2026

Photo: Marina Creydt

The food chemist has held the professorship in Instrumental Analysis at the Institute of Food Chemistry at TU Braunschweig since this summer semester. At the CSMC, she had led a research project entitled ‘Mass Spectrometric Proteome Analysis of Written Artefacts’.

Using analytical methods from food chemistry, it is possible to determine the origin of plant-based products such as strawberries and asparagus. In principle, the same also works for historical written artefacts. If a text does not reveal where the written artefact containing it comes from, its origin can under certain conditions be determined on the basis of its biological identity. Over several years, food chemist Marina Creydt researched at the CSMC how questions of provenance can be answered through metabolome and proteome analyses. She led a project entitled ‘Mass Spectrometric Proteome Analysis of Written Artefacts’ and was also an important part of the Palm-Leaf Manuscript Profiling Initiative (PLMPI), in which the CSMC Container Lab was used to determine the origin of historical manuscripts from Tamil Nadu in India. She talks about this work in the documentary ‘Our Container Lab. Mission 1: Palm-Leaf Profilers’ and in this blog post.

At the beginning of this summer semester, Marina Creydt moved to TU Braunschweig to take up a professorship in Instrumental Analysis in Food Chemistry there. Her main areas of work will be methods for detecting food fraud and the effects of climate change on plant-based foods.

The entire CSMC community wishes her all the best for this next career step!