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| General Family Notes |
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| NOTES and DOCUMENTS RELATED TO THE COOK'S |
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An Item of Interest as Related to the Comparison of Mitochondria DNA. |
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The following information is several quotes from the book "The Seven Daughters of Eve" written by Bryan Sykes, a leading world authority on DNA. The information comes from a chapter in the book dealing with the search for the Tsar and his family and their burial place. As you will notice and may find somewhat interesting is the comparison of James Cook's mtDNA and the shared mutation positions with the Tsar's and other members of his royal family. Apparently these particular mutations at these particular positions are actually very common in England and other parts of Europe. |
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(Page 63) "In July 1991 the remains of nine bodies were dug out of a shallow grave in birch woods just outside Ekaterinburg, formerly Sverdlovsk, in the Russian Urals. This exhumation was the culmination of years of research and persistence by the Russian geologist Aleksandr Avdonin, who thought he had located the resting place of the last of the Romanovs, the imperial Russian royal family. The last Tsar, Nicholas II, his wife, the Tsarina Alexandra, and their five children had been executed, or murdered - depending on your point of view - along with their doctor and three servants in the basement of the house in which they had been kept prisoner by the Bolsheviks. This was the night of 16 July 1918, in the turmoil of revolutionary Russia, and rather than risk the royal captives being released by White Russians who were then closing on the town, the decision was made, at the highest level, to kill them."
(Page 67) "Fortunately, it was possible to trace living direct maternal relatives of both the Tsar and the Tsarina. The Tsar had an unbroken maternal connection through his grandmother Louise of Hesse-Cassel, the Queen of Denmark, to a Count Nicolai Trubetskoy, seventy years old and living in peaceful retirement on the Cote d'Azur after.a lifetime as a merchant banker. The Tsarina could trace a direct maternal link through her sister Princess Victoria of Hesse to His Royal Highness Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, the husband of Queen Elizabeth II. After several rounds of discreet negotiation both men agreed to provide a small blood sample from which their DNA could be extracted. What would they show?"
(Page 67) "The notation everyone uses to compare mitochondrial DNA sequences involves quoting differences from a set reference sequence, in fact the very first mitochondrial DNA to be entirely sequenced, by a team from Cambridge in 1981. In this notation, a DNA sequence which differs from the reference sequence at the fifteenth and one hundredth positions in the 500 base control region segment is abbreviated to 15, 100. The sequence from the Duke of Edinburgh was 111, 357 using this notation. At all the other 498 positions along the 500 base stretch, the Duke's sequence was exactly the same as the reference sequence."
(Page 69) "But even though the mitochondrial DNA sequences of Trubetskoy and the male skeleton were not exactly the same, they were very close; and so near a miss invited further thought. They both shared three mutations at positions 126, 294 and 296. Trubetskoy had another one at position 169. Was it possible that there had been an error in reading the sequence of the 'Tsar's' mitochondrial DNA? The team went back to the original trace' from the sequencing machine and looked very closely at the readings at position 169 for the 'Tsar's' sample. "
(Page 71) "This means there is, at most, a one in a thousand chance that the mitochondrial DNA sequence from a European picked at random would match the Duke of Edinburgh. So there was still a very small chance that the female Ekaterinburg bones did not belong to the Tsarina and her children at all, but to another family who just happened to have the same mitochondrial DNA as the Duke of Edinburgh. The Trubetskoy sequence (126, 169, 294, 296) is again very rare and has not been seen in six thousand modern Europeans. However, the Tsar's main sequence (126, 294, 296) is much more frequent, with just under one in a hundred Europeans matching it exactly. So, once again there was a small but finite chance that the bones of the adult male were not the Tsar's but those of someone else who just happened to match.
(Page 71) "Though the DNA matches gave a pretty high level of proof already, there is a further level to consider. We have not yet taken into consideration the fact that the two sets of matching sequences were found in the same grave and came from the parents of the three children, according to the DNA fingerprints. How does that affect the result? The answer is that it makes the level of proof that these really were the Romanov bones very high indeed. The probability of getting matches to both sets of mitochondrial DNA sequences just by chance is the mathematical product of the individual probabilities. That is one in a thousand multiplied by one in a hundred, which comes to the vanishingly small figure of one in a hundred thousand. |
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James Cook's mtDNA HVR1 mutations sequence are as follows: 126C, 294T, 296T, 304C, 519C.
Count Nicolai Trubetskoy main sequence (126, 169, 294, 296)
Tsar, Nicholas II, main sequence (126, 294, 296) |
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