Miklós Kásler - Zoltán Szentirmay (szerk.): Identifying the Árpád Dynasty Skeletons Interred in the Matthias Church. Applying data from historical, archaeological, anthropological, radiological, morphological, radiocarbon dating and genetic research (Budapest, 2021)
CHAPTER SEVEN – Genetic investigations
At the Göttingen laboratory, after implementing 20 A-STR marker panels, the DNA isolated from the femur of skeleton II/52_3 was found to be of very poor quality, to which the possibility of DNA contamination contributed, because this DNA sample was previously investigated by Péter Nagy in the USA, and thus the result was no longer considered when studying family relations. The DNA isolated from the 2nd tarsus provided the best result. Even so, several missing alleles (dropouts, null alleles) were observed during amplification of the alleles for each marker. This meant that in many cases, the allele could be detected once during a trial of 4-8 amplifications. All of this indicated severe degradation of the DNA sample, in which very few target sequences were present. According to the Göttingen laboratory’s experience, such heavily degraded DNA samples containing very few target sequences tend to generate more and more stutter artifacts and other PCR errors. 5. DNA template quality for all skeletons and the detectability of individual A-STR markers depending on allele length The detectability of A-STR markers depends on two things: (1) Length of the alleles. We found that A-STR markers with longer alleles are much harder to detect. Such markers include D1S1656, D2S1338, D12S391, D19S433 and SE33. (2) The preservation of bone structure. It was possible to isolate fragmented DNA from the analysed bones, the length of which was 150-250 bp. Depending on the soundness of the bone structure, we split the skeletons into two groups. The DNA isolated from the bone samples of the first 131
