Michael Gallagher's Blog - Posts Tagged "tutankhamun"

I’ve had to learn masses of new things over the past few weeks and it’s been gruelling. The most interesting of these by far (though my head was aching for days while I struggled to make sense of it) was trying to interpret and compare DNA results from a selection of mummies found in or near the Valley of the Kings to see if and how they were related. Why was I doing this? Because the next book in the series, The Scarab Heart, is set in the Valley of the Kings and I wanted to check the findings out for myself.
There were times when I despaired of ever understanding how it worked. All you are presented with are sets of paired numbers. These, for example, are the findings for one particular mummy (lets call him Mummy 1), though eleven mummies in total were tested:

Locus D13S317: alleles 10, 12
Locus D7S820: alleles 10 , 15
Locus D2S1338: alleles 16, 26
Locus D21S11: alleles 29, 34
Locus D16S539: alleles 8 , 13
Locus D18S51: alleles 19 , 19

Each of the loci mentioned is a very specific section of the genome. The paired numbers (alleles) found at each represent particular characteristics inherited either from the subject’s mother or father, or from both (one allele from each). Is your head aching yet? My breakthrough came when I realised it was simply a numbers game. Here are the results for the person believed to be Mummy 1’s father (Mummy 2):

Locus D13S317: alleles 10, 12
Locus D7S820: alleles 15, 15
Locus D2S1338: alleles 16, 26
Locus D21S11: alleles 29, 34
Locus D16S539: alleles 11, 13
Locus D18S51: alleles 16, 19

Similar, aren’t they? Notice that I’ve marked some of the numbers in Mummy 1’s results. These alleles are not present in Mummy 2, so they must have come from Mummy 1’s mother.
It sounds a little simpler now, doesn’t it? Unless of course Mummy 2 is not in fact Mummy 1’s father, but his brother or half-brother instead.

P.S. Can anybody guess the identity of Mummy 1?