5300 years enclosure in a glacier could not harm the predominant part of the connective tissue of the tyrolean iceman “Oetzi”. Scientists from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich together with their colleagues from the European Research Academy (EURAC) at Bozen, Italy, demonstrated that the mummy´s collagen is almost identical with the collagen of a fresh skin sample. The reason for this exceptional conservation seems to be the freeze-drying of the Oetzi for thousands of years. In its’ recent publication, the group of PD Dr. Robert Stark, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, LMU, and member of the Nanosystems Initiative Munich (NIM), presents its’ studies on the molecular structure of collagen, the composition of molecule bundles, the collagen fibrils and on their elasticity. (Proceedings of Royal Society B online, 31. März 2010)

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