Genomic analysis of the blood attributed to Louis XVI (1754-1793), king of France.

Iñigo Olalde,Sergi Civit,Donata Luiselli,Irene González,Arcadi Navarro,Charleston W K Chiang,Magda Montfort,Carles Lalueza-Fox,Federico Sánchez-Quinto,Oscar Ramírez,Juan Antonio Rodríguez,Heinz Himmelbauer,Urko M Marigorta,Laura Matas-Lalueza,Marcos Fernández-Callejo,Philippe Charlier,Debayan Datta,Davide Pettener,Tomàs Marquès-Bonet

doi:10.1038/srep04666

Abstract

A pyrographically decorated gourd, dated to the French Revolution period, has been alleged to contain a handkerchief dipped into the blood of the French king Louis XVI (1754–1793) after his beheading but recent analyses of living males from two Bourbon branches cast doubts on its authenticity. We sequenced the complete genome of the DNA contained in the gourd at low coverage (~2.5×) with coding sequences enriched at a higher ~7.3× coverage. We found that the ancestry of the gourd's genome does not seem compatible with Louis XVI's known ancestry. From a functional perspective, we did not find an excess of alleles contributing to height despite being described as the tallest person in Court. In addition, the eye colour prediction supported brown eyes, while Louis XVI had blue eyes. This is the first draft genome generated from a person who lived in a recent historical period; however, our results suggest that this sample may not correspond to the alleged king.

Highlights

Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to Genomic analysis of the blood attributed to Louis XVI (1754–1793), king of France
The filtered human reads displayed the characteristic DNA damage patterns seen at the end of ancient sequences, the signal was lower in comparison to that seen in much older samples (Supplementary Fig. S3)
Different haplotypes were reconstructed from the mtDNA reads (Supplementary Table S3) with a predominant (73%) N1b1a2 haplotype, concordant with what had been previously determined by polymerase chain reaction (PCR)[7]; three additional haplotypes (H1a, J1c2c2 and K*), not shared with people involved in the experimental procedures were present in decreasing ratios (13%, 9.6% and 1.9%, respectively) adding up to a total upper limit of contamination of,24%

Summary

Introduction

Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to Genomic analysis of the blood attributed to Louis XVI (1754–1793), king of France. A pyrographically decorated gourd, dated to the French Revolution period, has been alleged to contain a handkerchief dipped into the blood of the French king Louis XVI (1754–1793) after his beheading but recent analyses of living males from two Bourbon branches cast doubts on its authenticity. The eye colour prediction supported brown eyes, while Louis XVI had blue eyes This is the first draft genome generated from a person who lived in a recent historical period; our results suggest that this sample may not correspond to the alleged king. To further explore the possibility that the gourd’s blood could belong to the king Louis XVI and shed further light on these contradictory results, we have retrieved the complete genome of the human sample contained within the gourd. The objective was to confirm or deny the authenticity of the sample and to try to correlate the genomic data with certain phenotypical traits reported by historical records that might correspond to the king

Methods

Results

Conclusion