The laboratory, which is located in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, began testing samples from ancient royal mummies from the 18th Dynasty in April as part of a project to identify the mummy of Hatshepsut, Egypt’s most famous female pharaoh.The initial findings will be revealed in a two-hour documentary titled "Secrets of Egypt's Lost Queen", which premiers Sunday, July 15 on the Discovery Channel.

The primary purpose of the new DNA laboratory is to assist in the identification of the mummy of Hatshepsut, as well as other mummies that have been removed from their original tombs, and to clarify familial relationships within and between Egypt’s ancient dynasties. This is the first time DNA testing has been used in the quest to identify an ancient Egyptian pharaoh. 

“By providing this technology to Egypt, Applied Biosystems is helping to advance science and bring our dead pharaohs back to life,” said Dr. Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities. “A basement that was once a maze of artifacts is now a cutting-edge scientific lab, the first of its kind dedicated to revealing the mysteries of our mummies.”

Mummy of Hatshepsut

DNA testing, combined with other forensic techniques, holds the potential to bring closure to unsolved mysteries and help Egypt fill in gaps in its significant history. The Discovery Channel enlisted the services of Applied Biosystems as part of a project aimed at discovering and identifying the lost mummy of Hatshepsut, one of the most important women in ancient Egyptian history. Hatshepsut was Egypt’s most powerful female ruler, but she died mysteriously and her name and monuments were systematically erased. The film will chronicle the quest to find and identify the mummy of Hatshepsut and understand the mysteries surrounding her death. For this project, the scientific team is testing two mummies that are known to be related to Hatshepsut – those of her maternal grandmother and her father – for comparison with two female mummies that were the final candidates thought to possibly be Hatshepsut.

Applied Biosystems provided the Supreme Council of Antiquities with DNA analysis instrument systems, reagents, software, and training. This included an Applied Biosystems 9700 Thermocycler for DNA amplification and a 3130 Genetic Analyzer for DNA analysis, as well as forensic testing reagents including its latest advance in human identification technology, the AmpFlSTR MiniFiler PCR Amplification Kit. The MiniFiler kit is the world’s first commercially available reagent kit for generating genetic profiles from aged, compromised, or damaged DNA samples.

The Egyptian team is conducting a combination of nuclear and mitochondrial DNA testing on the mummies. While nuclear DNA provides the most straightforward way to obtain an accurate DNA profile since it contains information from both parents, it is extremely difficult to obtain in cases of degraded samples as cells contain only one nucleus. Mitochondrial DNA is only passed down through the maternal side of a family, but because there can be thousands of mitochondria in each cell, mitochondrial DNA tests can supplement the analysis in cases where nuclear DNA testing fails to yield results.

The technical specialists from Applied Biosystems, in both human identification and genetic analysis, worked in Cairo to train members of the Egyptian team on the new DNA analysis technology.  “The analysis of ancient and degraded DNA samples provides significant challenges, but we are excited to bring our latest advances in genetic analysis to this and similar future projects in Egypt,” said Nicola Oldroyd, a senior forensic specialist at Applied Biosystems. “Initial results are very promising as both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA have been retrieved and amplified for these mummies. That in itself is a major accomplishment for the first project in a brand new lab. We are optimistic that the Egyptian scientific team now has everything in place to ultimately be successful in this project and future endeavours.”

Further Reading
Discovery Channel: www.discovery.com/lostqueen