Shot by the Bolsheviks: A photograph of the Romanov family captured in 1913, five years before their death. Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra are in the middle, with their son Alexei. The four girls are (left to right) Maria, Tatiana, Olga and Anastasia.
BRISBANE: Forensic DNA testing has finally confirmed that bodies found in a field near Yerkaterinburg, Russia, are two of the missing children of Russia's last Tsar, killed following the 1917 revolution.
The bodies are almost certainly the crown prince, Alexei Romanov, and one of his sisters, according to a report today in the journal PLoS ONE.
The discovery puts to rest the persistent rumour that one of the royal children escaped the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his family by a Bolshevik firing squad in 1918. Since that time, more then 200 people have claimed to be one of the Romanov children.
"None of the family survived the execution"
"Here we are able to give a full account of all of the Romanov family and can conclude that none of the family survived the execution," the authors said.
Human remains from a mass grave outside Yerkaterinburg were shown to be those of the Tsar, his wife Alexandra, and three of their five children in a 1994 Nature Genetics paper.
At the time, the authors, from Britain's Forensic Science Service and the Engelhardt Institute of Moscow, concluded that the missing remains were likely to be the prince and one of his sisters.
The new material – teeth and bone fragments from a male and a female, discovered 70 m from the original gravesite – was tested with forensic DNA techniques by two independent laboratories, the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL) in Rockville, U.S., and the Institute of Legal Medicine in Innsbruck, Austria.
Blood-stained shirt
The DNA tests confirmed that the new bodies belong to people closely related to those found in the larger mass grave, and have also linked the family to living relatives of both the Tsar and his wife, said lead author and AFDIL geneticist Mike Coble.
The researchers were also able to now prove that one body from the mass grave is definitely Tsar Nicholas II, Coble said, by comparing DNA from the bones to DNA from a shirt that was stained with the Tsar's blood during an assassination attempt in 1891.
The researchers took a three-pronged approach to the DNA analysis by examining the autosomal DNA, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), and Y-chromosome DNA of the new remains. Autosomal DNA is found in the regular chromosomes in the cell's nucleus, and is inherited from both the mother and the father.
Autosomal and mtDNA from the mass grave's bodies had been tested for the 1994 paper, Coble said, but this was the first time the Y-chromosome DNA had ever been examined.
