Decoding Beethoven's Genome
Ludwig van Beethoven is one of the most famous and revered composers in the history of music. Today researchers from the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, the Institute for Archaeological Sciences at the University of Tübingen, and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, published genomic analyses of hair samples from Beethoven himself, shedding new light on his genetic makeup and potential health conditions. The study involved genomic analyses of eight locks of hair attributed to Ludwig van Beethoven, with researchers confirming the authenticity of five of them and sequencing Beethoven's genome to a high coverage of 24-fold. The findings revealed that Beethoven had a genetic predisposition for liver disease (polygenic risk score (PRS) placed him within the 96th risk percentile, he was homozygous for the variant consistently implicated as the most strongly associated locus for liver cirrhosis in GWASs, at rs738409 in PNPL...