January 2020 News
January 2020 News
Happy New Year! Although EnCor is primarily a commercial enterprise we still do have several ongoing interesting collaborations with academia. For instance we were involved in a recent high profile publication in molecular archaeology; a severed human head was found in surprisingly well preserved state in a pit in Heslington, near York, England and dated to 2,600 years ago. The original owner of the head had presumably been executed or sacrificed, something which apparently happened quite a lot in pre-Roman Britain. This skull was found to contain a shrunken but surprisingly well preserved brain, which generated considerable interest, see the Wikipedia page here. EnCor in collaboration with a group of European scientists showed that tissue from this brain was able to elicit immune response to two important brain proteins, GFAP and MBP, indicating that these proteins were surprisingly stable and still immunogenic over more than two and a half millennia. These findings were confirmed using mass spectroscopy and other experiments showed that many other brain proteins were partially preserved. The paper was just published (see here) in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. The report has generated considerable media interest, see for example here, here and here, or just do a Google search for “2,600 year old brain”.
