As Halloween draws near, store aisles are filling up with decorations and costumes of vampires, witches and, of course, mummies.
Researchers from Virginia-based Parabon NanoLabs recently shared images of what real-world mummies from ancient Egypt might have looked like when they were alive. According to the company, “predicted faces” from three ancient mummies were revealed last month during the International Symposium on Human Identification in Orlando, Fla.
All three of the mummified remains used to create the faces were from an ancient Nile community called Abusir el-Meleq. They are estimated to be between 2,023 and 2,797 years old.
Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and the University of Tubingen in Germany processed the mummies before the face predictions were created. Enzymatic damage repair was performed on each sample and the scientists studied the genome for each mummy.
Parabon “believes this is the first time comprehensive DNA phenotyping has been performed on human DNA of this age,” said the company. Recent bioinformatic advances made the project possible, the company added.
“Parabon has been the leader in forensic microarray analysis for years, and with the introduction of this new imputation technology, we can now handle even the most challenging samples, ancient or forensic,” said Parabon bioinformaticist and WGS analyst, Dr. Janet Cady, who spearheaded the work.
Previously, the company has garnered media attention for helping police solve cold-case crimes through DNA analysis. Parabon used technology it calls a Snapshot DNA Phenotyping pipeline to analyze the mummy samples. This technology was developed to “operate on challenging samples,” the company explained.
Snapshot was used to predict each mummy's ancestry, pigmentation, and face morphology.
According to Parabon, the ancestry of the mummy samples was determined to be more similar to modern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern individuals than to modern Egyptians. Predictions from snapshot indicate the mummified humans has light brown complexions when they were alive, as well as dark hair, dark eyes and no freckles.
These predictions were combined with other data about the mummies to create three-dimensional face morphology of what the samples would have looked like when they were 25 years old.
“It's great to see how genome sequencing and advanced bioinformatics can be applied to ancient DNA samples,” said Dr. Ellen Greytak, Parabon's Director of Bioinformatics. “Just like in Parabon's law enforcement casework, these techniques are revolutionizing ancient DNA analysis because they operate on fragmented DNA and have been shown to be sensitive down to only 10 picograms of DNA.”
Related
Related
