Complete Mitochondrial Genome Sequencing of a Burial from a Romano-Christian Cemetery in the Dakhleh Oasis, Egypt: Preliminary Indications.

The curse of ancient Egyptian DNA was lifted by a recent study which sequenced the mitochondrial genomes (mtGenome) of 90 ancient Egyptians from the archaeological site of Abusir el-Meleq. Surprisingly, these ancient inhabitants were more closely related to those from the Near East than to contemporary Egyptians. It has been accepted that the timeless highway of the Nile River seeded Egypt with African genetic influence, well before pre-Dynastic times. Here we report on the successful recovery and analysis of the complete mtGenome from a burial recovered from a remote Romano-Christian cemetery, Kellis 2 (K2). K2 serviced the ancient municipality of Kellis, a village located in the Dakhleh Oasis in the southwest desert in Egypt. The data were obtained by high throughput sequencing (HTS) performed independently at two ancient DNA facilities (Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, Dover, DE, USA and Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA). These efforts produced concordant haplotypes representing a U1a1a haplogroup lineage. This result indicates that Near Eastern maternal influence previously identified at Abusir el-Meleq was also present further south, in ancient Kellis during the Romano-Christian period.

Titanic's unknown child: the critical role of the mitochondrial DNA coding region in a re-identification effort.

This report describes a re-examination of the remains of a young male child recovered in the Northwest Atlantic following the loss of the Royal Mail Ship Titanic in 1912 and buried as an unknown in Halifax, Nova Scotia shortly thereafter. Following exhumation of the grave in 2001, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) hypervariable region 1 sequencing and odontological examination of the extremely limited skeletal remains resulted in the identification of the child as Eino Viljami Panula, a 13-month-old Finnish boy. This paper details recent and more extensive mitochondrial genome analyses that indicate the remains are instead most likely those of an English child, Sidney Leslie Goodwin. The case demonstrates the benefit of targeted mtDNA coding region typing in difficult forensic cases, and highlights the need for entire mtDNA sequence databases appropriate for forensic use.