María Inés Zylber visits BioArch

María Inés Zylber is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Parasitology, Hadassah Medical School, Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Supervisor: Prof. Charles Greenblatt)

Thesis title: “Mummy remains: morphological, microbiological and biochemical approaches to their molecular taphonomy”.

The objectives of her study are:

1. Extend the knowledge of changes in "ancient biomolecules" as caused by post-mortem transformation processes in human tissue.


2. Apply an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the stability of biomolecules in different ancient tissues, based on the visualized structures.

She is working on two collections: Nubian mummies (A.D. 550 – 1450) and Hungarian mummies (1731 – 1838).

At BioArch she is doing shotgun proteomics in order to study the level of degradation of mummy tissues by assesing the state of preservation of collagen type I in both populations of study. The techniques for this approach are protein extraction from soft and mineralised tissues with posterior characterization by nanoLC-MS/MS and TEM.

Contact details:
Lic. María Inés Zylber
Department of Parasitology
Hebrew University - Hadassah Medical School
P.O.Box 12272, Ein Karem
Jerusalem 91120, ISRAEL
Telephone: 972-(0)2-6757468
Mobile: 972-(0)52-3611774
Fax: 972-(0)2-6757425
Website: http://kuvin.huji.ac.il