Solving the Mystery of the Romanovswritten by Jonathan Judy

In July of 1991, nine skeletal remains were exhumed from a mass
grave in Siberia, Russia. The bones were discovered near a place where a
Russian royal family was murdered during the Russian revolution. People
began to question if the bones belonged to Czar Nicholas and Czarina
Alexandra, three of the daughters, their son Alexi, and three traveling
servants. To answer this question, scientists turned to mitochondria DNA
sequence polymorphisms. The mitochondria found in human cells contain a
genome separate from the cells nuclear genome. This genome contains only
27 genes, involved in the process of oxidative phosphorylation. Yet there
is a noncoding region about 1,100 nucleotides long. This region contains
signals that control the replication of the chromosome and the
transcription of the mitochondria genes. This DNA sequence accumulates
mutations ten times the rate of the ...