blood

Bones and Blood: Uncovering History Through DNA

Posted on by Riley Bell

Halloween invites us to look beneath the surface—to find the stories hidden in bones, blood, and the echoes of the past. Science, too, has its own way of conjuring the long dead, not through spells but through DNA analysis. The three Promega Connections blogs highlighted below revisit centuries-old mysteries, using modern genetics to reveal the truths hidden where legend once ruled.

The Bones of a King: Richard III

Under a modern car park in Leicester, England, archaeologists uncovered bones twisted by scoliosis and scarred by battle. Could these truly belong to the infamous Richard III? DNA evidence answered with haunting precision in “King Richard III Identified.”

Mitochondrial DNA matched that of a living descendant of Richard’s sister, confirming the king’s identity more than 500 years after his death. Beyond solving a royal mystery, genetic analysis gave historians a clearer picture of the much-maligned monarch—his appearance, stature, and final violent moments. The same technology that identified Richard III may one day reveal the fate of his murdered nephews, the “Princes in the Tower.” Even as bones turn to dust, DNA keeps their stories alive.

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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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ProK: An Old ‘Pro’ That is Still In The Game

Posted on by Nives Kovacevic
Proteinase K Ribbon Structure ImageSource=RCSB PDB; StructureID=4b5l; DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.2210/pdb4b5l/pdb;
Proteinase K Ribbon Structure ImageSource=RCSB PDB; StructureID=4b5l; DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.2210/pdb4b5l/pdb;

If you enter any molecular lab asking to borrow some Proteinase K, lab members are likely to answer: “I know we have it. Let me see where it is”. Sometimes the enzyme will be found to have expired. The lab may also have struggled with power outages or freezer malfunctions in the past. But the lab still decides to keep the enzyme. One may rightly ask – why do labs hang on to Proteinase K even when it has been stored under sub-standard conditions?

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