16 April 2025 – Jorūnė Sakalauskaitė says her EMBO Fellowship came at a critical time in her career. “When I finished my postdoc in Denmark, I was unsure whether to stay in science. I was a little tired and overworked,” she says. “The EMBO Fellowship confirmed that what I was doing is actually interesting to other people and worth pursuing. It was the important transition to where I am now.”
Sakalauskaitė also attended the EMBO lab leadership course offered as part of the fellowship. “It was one of the best courses that I ever did,” she says.
Her research is in the field of paleoproteonomics working closely with archaeologists and marine biologists although Sakalauskaitė initially studied chemistry and its application to culture heritage. “It was analytical physical chemistry using different spectroscopy techniques, mostly analyzing different paintings. But it didn’t feel like it was going anywhere,” she says. “A little bit randomly I found this field using mass spectrometry techniques to study proteins. I now look at ancient proteins in mollusc shells especially during the Neolithic time in Europe about six to 8,000 years ago when shells were used as jewelry objects.”
She says most research in paleoproteonomics focuses on bones or animal artifacts to identify the foods people ate or the type of fauna in a particular region. “I look at smaller shells that people used to make jewelry. We find Mediterranean species spread across Central Europe and the north,” she says. “That helps us to understand how people were connected in the past through trade routes. We work very closely with archaeologists who have a question and we have the tools that can help provide answers.”
Sakalauskaitė’s research also has a more fundamental driver: why do proteins preserve so well in some mineralized tissues?
“A protein in solution doesn’t last long, but we can find proteins in mineralized tissues for millions of years. Why are they there? What do they do to the structures, and do they have a function to keep the structure together?” she says, adding that proteins can be found in ancient mollusc or egg shells or human teeth enamel.
“Proteins have been found in teeth several millions of years old from Asian hominids, not even from Homo sapiens!” Sakalauskaitė says. Her current work is with Littorina sea snails to use CRISPR-CAS9 techniques to understand the role of proteins in color mineralization. “I’m now waiting to get 40,000-year-old shells of that species to see which proteins are preserved,” she says.
