The facts concerned the relics of St. Elizabeth, Empress Alexandra's sister, which had been brought from Jerusalem. American and Russian researchers at the Stanford University and the National Laboratories in Los Alamos recently finished biological expertise of a relic sample.
"We compared St. Elizabeth's DNA with that of the remains a [Russian] government commission had identified as Empress Alexandra's, and we came at a crying difference," said Lev Zhivotovsky, D.Sc., active on the expertise. He is Senior Researcher at the Institute of General Genetics under the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Sisters' mitochondrial DNA is supposed to be identical. The amount of genes in such DNA is several thousand-fold smaller than in nuclear, and the former genes are all but immune to mutations, due to their essential necessity for the organism, he explained to report.
Dr. Zhivotovsky put to doubt a Russian expertise of 1994, which identified remains unearthed in the Sverdlovsk Region, Urals, as of Nicholas II's family.
"The errors of the 1994 DNA studies have been analyzed. As we know, forensic medical procedure standards were violated on a number of instances during that expertise, and were at variance with the facts of the case. Last but not least, the alleged sisters' DNA samples were not identical. All that testifies against the assumption of the 'Yekaterinburg remains' belonging to the Royal family," said Pyotr Koltypin-Vallovsky, one of the leaders of the Overseas Russian Investigation Commission for the Remains of the Russian Imperial House Members Murdered by Bolsheviks in Yekaterinburg, July 17, 1918.
Post-revolutionary Russian emigres and their offsprings established the commission in 1989, shortly after screenplay writer Geli Ryabov sensationally announced that he had come upon the remains of Emperor Nicholas II and his family.
The shooting of Nicholas II and his family came back from the oblivion in 1993, and a decision was taken to rebury the remains.
A sequence of genetic analyses started in Great Britain, the USA and Russia the same year. Used as standard were the remains of a person certainly belonging to the last Royal family-Grand Duke George, Nicholas' brother, who died at the age of 19 and was interred in the Imperial sepulcher at St. Peter and Paul's Cathedral in St. Petersburg.
A comparison brought out a perfectly analogous anomaly of the genetic code. In 1998, it took the experts to a conclusion that the remains unearthed in Yekaterinburg belonged to the martyred Royalty-Empress Alexandra, her children Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatyana, Maria, Anastasia, and her son Crown Prince Alexis.
