How Mitochondrial DNA Named the Romanovs | Forensic Briefing

Yekaterinburg, July 1918. The Tsar, the Tsarina, their five children, and four servants are executed in a cellar. The bodies vanish for seventy-three years.

Mitochondrial DNA, the genetic material housed inside the cell's energy organelles, survives heat, burial, and time that destroy ordinary nuclear DNA. It is inherited exclusively through the maternal line, unchanged across centuries.

In 1991, Doctor Peter Gill of the British Forensic Science Service sequenced fragments of bone from nine skeletons exhumed near Yekaterinburg. Prince Philip of Edinburgh, grand-nephew of Tsarina Alexandra through her sister Princess Victoria of Hesse, supplied the maternal reference. His mitochondrial sequence matched the Tsarina and three children identically.

In 2007, two more bodies were found in a second grave nearby. The same technique identified them as Tsarevich Alexei and Grand Duchess Maria. The Anastasia myth ended on a microscope slide.

It was a landmark in forensic anthropology, and the first identification of a sovereign by his maternal ancestor's cells.

In this Forensic Briefing, we examine how a single strand of DNA passed only from mother to child reached across three centuries to name the dead.

Cold Papers. The file remains open.

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