DNA Test Confirms Dead Czar's Identity

Science News, April 20, 1996

A new genetic analysis may finally allow former Russian Czar Nicholas Romanov II to rest in peace. On the night of July 16, 1918, a firing squad of Bolshevik soldiers executed the Russian royal family, including Nicholas, and buried the bodies in a hidden mass grave. The burial site finally came to light in 1989, and 2 years later nine skeletons were excavated.

Though fornesic analyses of the bones, clothing, and other material from the grave have provided strong evidence that some of the skeletons belonged to the czar and his family, attempts to confirm the identifications by analyzing DNA smaples have provoked controversy. When researchers compared DNA from bones presumed to be those of Nicholas II with DNA from two living relatives, they found an unusual mismatch.

DNA is composed of long sequences of building blocks called nucleotides, which come in four forms that geneticists label A, C, G and T. The bits of DNA from the skeleton and Nichlas II's relatives matched perfectly except at one position. At a nucleotide site where both living relatives had a T, some of the DNA smaples from Nicholas' bones had a T but others had a C. Such a variation is a rare condition called heteroplasmy.

Despite the difference, investigators proclaimed that Nicholas had been identified. Yet the Russian Federation government and the Russian Orthodox Chruch, which is considering canonizing the entire Romanov family, demanded further proof. In July of 1994, researchers resorted to exhuming the body of Georgij Romanov, Nicholas' younger brother, who had died of tuberculosis in 1899.

Like Nicholas's DNA, Gerogij's had either C or T present at the controversial site, report Pavel L. Ivanov of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow and a team from the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Rockville, Md., led by Thomas J Parsons. The team describes its findings in the April Nature Genetics. The heteroplasmy, says Parsons, must have disappeared somewhere in the generations after Nicholas.

An editorial in Nature Genetics notes that this is the first time heteroplasmy has been used to aid identification. "To me, this is the nail in the lid. It's the most convincing argument I've seen," adds Willaim R, Maples of the University of Florida in Gainesville, who had suggested earlier that Nicholas' apparent heteroplasmy resulted from contamination of the DNA samples.