Genetic identification of Spanish civil war victims. The state of the art in Catalonia (Northeastern Spain)

Abstract

At the end of 2016 and under the initiative and funding of the “Direcció General de Memòria democràtica-Departament de Justícia” (Generalitat of Catalonia), it was decided to recover and identify the remains of people disappeared in Catalonia during and after the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939).Anthropology, archaeology, history and genetics are part of the global procedure. To achieve identification by genotyping, two different genetic approaches have been carried out: 1) the directed identification through kinship analysis of alleged living relatives, when there is a previous evidence (archaeological, anthropological, historical) of a possible relationship (direct search); 2) the random crossing of a genetic profile database of victims and another database of alleged relatives in search of a possible identification (random search). The analyses of autosomal STRs, Y chromosome STRs and, in particular cases, X-InDels and mitochondrial DNA have been applied in both approaches.Here, we present the state of the process in Catalonian mass graves. Nowadays, a total of 102 post-mortem skeletal remains have been genotyped for autosomal STRs by Global Filer Express and Y-STRs from Yfiler Plus kit. Results were compared to nowadays data of living relatives in a database of 1519 genotyped for Global Filer kit, Yfiler Plus when paternally lineage was expected (248) and mitochondrial markers when maternally lineage was expected (111). Up to now, we have identified 5 victims: 4 were identified by direct strategy (including Y-STRs and mitochondrial DNA in 2 cases) and one by random search, without any previous evidence, suggesting that both strategies are useful in this context.