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

SUMMARY: The D2S441 markers of skeleton 11/52 and Béla

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are shown to differ from each other, not just with PCR but with sequencing as well. The DNA sequence analysis also showed that another 4 traditional PCR differences of marker 1 alleles were shown to be identical after all. All of this means that out of the 20 A-STR markers of the Árpád

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King labelled 11/52 and King Béla

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19 are identical, which points toward close relatedness. In the human population a subset of STR alleles differs from the reference allele variants only in one or more basepairs. The alleles which contain sequence variations (SNP) and differ from unchanged alleles only to a small degree are called microvariant alleles. Microvariant alleles are no different in length from consensus alleles. The first allele (Al) of the D3S1358 marker of both skeleton 11/52 and Béla

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shows the following microvariant sequence: TCTA [TCTG]2 [TCTA]|2> which is different from the consensus variation of the marker (TCTA [TCTG]3 [TCTA] but the allele lengths are the same. Furthermore, in marker D7S820, before the repeating sequences on the 5’-end, we found C>T sequence variation (SNP) in both skeletons’ samples. The same sequence variations found in both person 11/52 and King Béla

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occur in such a way only if they are directly related.

The differences between the PCR and sequencing data may have several explanations, such as a broken (fragmented) DNA strand hybridizing with another DNA strand in a flawed way, reproducible artifacts of the samples, the DNA sample returned to us being contaminated, or the above mentioned PCR amplification error.

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