Department of Archaeology
MIB - The Interface between Materials and Biology
mIb is a major research collaboration set up in 2010 involving 7 Universities in the UK and Denmark as primary members and strong links to 5 Universities and 4 industrial partners in 5 countries.
The purpose of the project is to understand the way the conjunction of hard and soft materials (e.g. membranes with calcite) in nature leads to materials with remarkable properties. In the long run, this will lead to the ability to design better biomaterials such as bone, to improve the efficiency with which oil can be extracted from chalk and sandstone deposits, and perhaps even to capture and store CO2 emissions as geological mineral deposits.
Within BioArCh we are using proteomics to explore proteins entrapped within the intra-crystalline fraction of eggshell.