Two scientists have already been awarded a European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) fellowship at the VU Life Sciences Centre. One of them is Dr Jorūnė Sakalauskaitė, who will be giving a seminar entitled ‘Search for ancient proteins: the present & the future of palaeoproteomics‘ this Friday at the VU LSC.
Dr. J. Sakalauskaitė started the EMBO project this autumn and works at the LSC Institute of Biosciences. She obtained her PhD at the Universities of Turin and Burgundy (Italy & France) and later on continued her research at the University of Copenhagen.
‘I work with palaeoproteomics, that is the study of ancient proteins preserved in archaeological samples, with a special focus on mollusc shells. With an EMBO grant I am starting a new project called ‘Shell Archaeochrome‘, where I will be investigating the molecular aspects of shell colours,‘ says the researcher.
The main scope of the project is to characterise the biomolecular structure of shell biochromes, understand how they are mineralised into the shell skeleton and explore what molecular traces preserve in ancient shells. For this, omic techniques will be employed (i.e., proteomics, transcriptomics) as well as gene editing.