A centuries-old sketch may be holding more than artistic secrets—it might carry traces of Leonardo da Vinci himself. A team behind the Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project says it has extracted human DNA from "Holy Child," a red chalk drawing some believe could be by da Vinci, and from a 15th-century letter written by one of his distant relatives, Science reports. In a paper posted to bioRxiv, they report that Y chromosome fragments from both objects fall into the same genetic branch, a lineage found in Tuscany, da Vinci's home turf. That makes it plausible, but far from certain, that some of the DNA on the drawing is da Vinci's.
"Establishing unequivocal identity ... is extremely complex," notes project member David Caramelli of the University of Florence; another geneticist estimates the odds at roughly "a flip of a coin." The work is part of an ambitious, decade-long attempt to do what has never been done: reliably pin down da Vinci's genetic profile. His original burial site was partly destroyed during the French Revolution, and his remains were lost or mixed with others, Live Science reports. He had no direct descendants, his mother's burial place is unknown, and scientists have been denied access to his father's tomb. Evolutionary biologist S. Blair Hedges says identifying da Vinci's DNA is "about as hard a target [as] there is" in the field.
Researchers are instead building a genetic trail: swabbing disputed drawings; sampling letters sealed with wax and thumbprints; excavating a family vault beneath a church in Vinci that has yielded bones from a possible grandfather; and sequencing Y chromosomes from recently identified living male descendants of da Vinci's father, including an Italian inventor. If they can define a distinctive "da Vinci Y," DNA lifted from artworks and notebooks could one day be matched against it.
The implications go beyond one Renaissance giant, Science reports. The project is helping establish "arteomics," the study of DNA and other biological traces on historical objects, as a potential new tool for authenticating and protecting art. That raises tantalizing scientific questions, too. If da Vinci's DNA is ever definitively identified and more of his genome reconstructed—from a rumored lock of hair in France, or from heavily fingered notebooks like the Codex Leicester—researchers hope to probe whether any variants might be linked to traits such as his unusually acute perception of motion and light.
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
