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 EIGHT – PCR and NGS investigations

3. A

new allele could randomly appear next to one of the real A-STR allele pairs during the allele length analyses, which could cause a problem with the evaluation. This is what we call “peak outside normal allele length”. The peaks can be longer, shorter, or the same length as the corresponding consensus alleles. This phenomenon could theoretically occur with markers D2S1338 and D19S433. In the Göttingen

laboratory,

an allele length (25/-) only appeared with the D2S1338 marker of skeleton 11/52 once out of 13 attempts, which is a significant difference compared to both the results of the Budapest-1 laboratory achieved with a different detection kit, and the results of sequencing as well. For this reason, it could not be accepted as a fingerprint.

4. The

Göttingen

laboratory

mentions some technical problems which made A-STR marker investigations more difficult and affected the results: (a) The remaining samples of the DNA isolated from Béla

Ill

’s tarsus returned from Dr RN. from the USA may have become contaminated, (b) The marker results obtained from the DNA isolated from the femur of skeleton II/52_3 were different in three cases from the results obtained from the DNA of the two tarsi. In this case too, the possibility of severe contamination was considered, as well as the possibility of PCR artifact errors described above. The possibility of the femur belonging to another individual was ruled out by the comparative analysis described in Section 6 of Chapter 7, as well as by the Budapest-1 laboratory’s mitochondrial DNA analysis (see Table 7). (c) There is a suspicion of an artifact in the case of the 17.2 allele of marker D19S433 of skeletons 11/53 and 11/54.

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