Konstantina Drosou, BSc, MSc, PhD

Programme Director / Lecturer  - MSc Biomedical Egyptology

I am leading three units, Human Osteology and Anatomy, Background to palaeopathology and molecular palaeopathology. As an ancient DNA specialist, I am trying to introduce my students to the world of ancient genetics by walking them through the journey from sample collection, to lab work, to computational proccessing and variant interpretation and finally to contextualising the results in a broader context.

Konstantina Drosou is a principal investigator specialising in Evolutionary Genomics. She is programme director and lecturer in the MSc Biomedical Egyptology. She is based at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology where she is the Director of the human ancient DNA clean room facilities, as well as the Stopford building where her modern DNA lab is.

Her research interests involve  investigation of origins, lifestyle and evolution of disease using modern discovery omics from minimally invasive biopsies. These analyses predict evolutionary data for people and organisms, bring understanding of the developmental timeframe of genetic diseases and combined with archaeological data inform a cultural understanding of disease management and long-term care for individual with chronic diseases. population genetics, kinship analysis and ancestry identification. She has undertaken extensive work on different types of human remains such as teeth, bones and muscle tissue, and she is well versed at the forensic – standard requirements for sampling, storing, biomolecule extraction and purification procedures, and anti-contamination and authentication controls.

Her experimental approach has focused primarily on genomic analysis but together with her collaborators they have also applied proteomics analysis using staple techniques such as Bradford assays, SDS-PAGE, and LC-MS/MS analysis to identify low and high confidence protein groups, as well as post-transnational modifications such as deamidation and hydroxylation, followed by computational, metagenomic and metaproteomic analyses. Her research group is now working on mummified tissues from the biorepository of the KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology at the University of Manchester.