Genetic Identity and Forensics

Update: Is It the Blood of Louis XVI?

Posted on by Terri Sundquist
Statue of King Henry IV at Pont Neuf in Paris
Statue of King Henry IV at Pont Neuf in Paris

In an earlier blog entry, I wrote about the ill-fated Louis XVI, the French king who was famously beheaded along with his wife, Marie-Antoinette, during the French Revolution in 1793. Witnesses to the execution dipped handkerchiefs in the king’s blood and kept them as souvenirs of the common people’s rebellion. In 2010, scientists published the presumptive DNA profile of the king, obtained from one of these bloody handkerchiefs (1). Shortly after this profile was published, doubters surfaced, arguing that scientists could not say with certainty that the blood was that of Louis XVI. Clearly, more work was needed to identify the source of the blood. Recently, additional work was published (2,3). The most recent data (3) were presented at the 2013 International Symposium on Human Identification; these newest data cast doubt on the identification of the remains of not one king, but two.

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A Molecular Approach to Estimating Time of Death

Posted on by Sara Klink

Stopwatch
I will admit that over the years, I have watched various crime scene investigation shows and read several books by Kathy Reichs and Patricia Cornwell because I was fascinated by forensic science. These same books and shows are a guilty pleasure because as a scientist, I know these portrayals do not accurately reflect how laboratory work is done. Answers are not so cut and dried as an exact estimation of time of death—for example, death was five hours before the body was found in an abandoned warehouse. However, scientists are always looking for ways to improve accuracy in time of death estimates, which are currently based on a few physical clues that are affected by environment and other factors. One approach taken by Sampaio-Silva et al. (1) was to assess the RNA degradation using reverse transcription quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR).

The authors of this PLOS ONE article wanted to determine if nucleic acid degradation could be used as a method to improve time of death estimates. Continue reading “A Molecular Approach to Estimating Time of Death”

“Fingerprinting” Your Cell Lines

Posted on by Anupama Gopalakrishnan

Working in the laboratoryResearchers working with immortalized cell lines would readily agree when I state that it is almost impossible to look at cells under the microscope and identify them by name. There are phenotypic traits, however they do change with change in media composition, passage number and in response to growth factors. I remember the pretty arborizations my neuroblastoma cell line SH-SY5Y exhibited in response to nerve growth factor treatment. Thus physical appearance is not a distinguishing feature. Currently, in many labs, researchers typically use more than one cell line, and more than likely, share the same lab space to passage cells and the same incubator to grow the cells. In such scenarios, it is not difficult to imagine that cell lines might get mislabeled or cross-contaminated. For example HeLa cells, one of the fastest growing cell lines have been shown to invade and overtake other cell lines.

Misidentification of cell lines has deep and severe implications. A review of cell lines used to study esophageal adenocarcinoma found that a large number of the cell lines were actually derived from lung or gastric cancers. Unfortunately, by the time this error was discovered, data from these cell line studies were already being used for clinical trials and other advanced studies and publications. Moreover, the cell lines were being to screen and design and test specific cancer drugs which ended up in flawed clinical trials. Continue reading ““Fingerprinting” Your Cell Lines”

King Richard III Identified

Posted on by Terri Sundquist

Richard IIIBy now, you’ve seen the headlines. The bones that scientists found buried under a car park in Leicester, England, have been identified as those of the last Plantagenet king of England: Richard III. For those of you who might be new to this story, archaeologists identified and excavated the most likely burial spot for Richard III, under a car park near the Leicester City Council building, and unearthed a human skeleton with skeletal abnormalities similar to those of Richard III. Geneticists were called in to perform DNA analysis to determine if these bones were those of the English king. The DNA findings were just recently released. Now that scientists can say beyond a reasonable doubt that these bones belong to Richard III, we are learning new things about the ancient king. Continue reading “King Richard III Identified”

Identifying the Victims of John Wayne Gacy

Posted on by Terri Sundquist

John Wayne Gacy was a notorious serial killer who sexually assaulted and murdered 33 boys and young men in the 1970s in Chicago, Illinois. The killing spree stopped only when he was arrested in 1978 after the parents of his last victim contacted police with critical information that implicated Gacy in the boy’s disappearance. He was tried, convicted and in 1994 executed for his crimes. Of the 33 victims that police found buried in and around his home, only 25 could be identified, leaving eight victims nameless and eight families to wonder if their missing loved one died at the hands of this evil man. When all available means of identification were exhausted, these eight sets of remains were buried but not forgotten.

In 2011, these remains were exhumed and the victim’s DNA analyzed to try to provide clues as to their identity.

Continue reading “Identifying the Victims of John Wayne Gacy”

Are These the Bones of Richard III?

Posted on by Terri Sundquist

In central England, an archaeological dig is happening in an unlikely spot—a parking lot in the city of Leicester. The goal: To find the final resting spot of Richard III, the last of England’s Plantagenet kings and perhaps one of its most maligned rulers. Richard III reigned over England for only two years before being killed by Henry Tudor’s army during the Battle of Bosworth Field in August 1485 at the end of the War of the Roses, which pitted Richard’s House of York against the House of Lancaster. Many historical records suggest that Richard’s body was brought to Leicester and buried between the nave and altar at Grey Friars church. You would think that a king’s tomb would be well marked and well remembered, even for an unpopular king like Richard III, but that is not the case here. Henry was said to have erected a memorial for his former rival, but that and any other monuments, along with the church itself, are long gone, destroyed during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, when Henry VIII was named Supreme Head of the Church in England and systematically razed monasteries, convents and friaries throughout England, Wales and Ireland between 1536 and 1541. Since then, the exact location of Richard III’s remains was lost to history. However, thanks to a team of University of Leicester archaeologists and geneticists that might be changing.

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DNA Typing Confirms Bronze Age Mix-and-Match Burials

Posted on by Terri Sundquist

Archaeologists have made an interesting discovery while excavating the late Bronze Age/early Iron Age settlement named Cladh Hallan on the island of South Uist in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland. They have uncovered four human skeletons buried at regular intervals beneath three roundhouses dating from the 11th century BC: an adult male, an adult female, a 10–14-year-old girl and a 3-year-old child. The careful arrangement of these burials directly below the roundhouses led archaeologists to initially hypothesize that these might be foundation burials—an ancient practice in which people, usually younger people, were sacrificed and buried under a building’s foundation in the belief that their blood and spirit would protect and strengthen the building and building site. As strange as that custom seems to us, it gets weirder. Two of these skeletons showed signs of mummification and contained skeletal elements from multiple individuals intentionally pieced together to form intact skeletons. Continue reading “DNA Typing Confirms Bronze Age Mix-and-Match Burials”

How Identical are Identical Twins?

Posted on by Terri Sundquist

Identical twins are derived from the same fertilized ovum and, therefore, should be…well… identical, right? They look the same and often dress the same, especially as children, and many people often have a hard time distinguishing one twin from the other. They are indistinguishable by genetic testing.

However, identical twins are not always identical, as the authors of a recent letter to the editor of Forensic Science International Genetics point out (1). Continue reading “How Identical are Identical Twins?”

Toilet Paper: The Newest Tool in the Fight Against Crime

Posted on by Terri Sundquist

A roll of toilet paperIn July of 2009, the bodies of 43-year-old Alan Grna and his 85-year-old mother Julianna were discovered in their Ohio home—both victims of a violent assault. The lead detective in the case called in the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation (BCI) to collect evidence from the crime scene, evidence that would lead them to the man who was eventually convicted of their murders. One of the key pieces of evidence was a roll of toilet paper.
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The Daughters of King Tutankhamun

Posted on by Terri Sundquist
Pharaoh's burial mask
The burial mask of pharaoh Tutankhamun, whose mummy was found buried with his two daughters.

The pharaoh Tutankhamun ruled ancient Egypt during the 18th dynasty of the New Kingdom (circa 1550–1295 BC), one of the most powerful royal houses in ancient Egypt. Although he sat on the throne for only 9 years and died at the young age of 19, he is one of the most well known pharaohs, due largely in part to the discovery of his intact tomb by archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922. The tomb was filled with riches befitting a king, including an elaborate sarcophagus with a gold burial mask and statues of ancient Egyptian gods such as Osiris and Anubis, as well as gold jewelry, statues and images of servants, ornate furniture, models of boats and other items that the pharaoh would need in the afterlife. A lesser known item discovered in his tomb was an undecorated wooden box in which two small gilded coffins lay side by side. These coffins held the mummified remains of King Tutankhamun’s two stillborn daughters. Recently, researchers examined these remains in detail to determine their gestational ages and characterize any congenital abnormalities that they might have inherited from the boy king.

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