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 PNPLA3). Evidence of an infection with Hepatitis B virus was also found (The reconstructed sequence was aligned with a set of modern HBV genomes representative of the currently described diversity of the virus). 

It's possible that Beethoven’s Hepatitis B infection greatly contributed to the composer’s severe liver disease, exacerbated by his alcohol intake and genetic risk. 

Additionally, his polygenic scores for Crohn disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) placed him in the 36th and 61st percentiles, respectively, while his PRS for Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS, 9th polygenic risk percentile) conferred a protective status with an OR of 0.39. Beethoven lacked the HLA-DQ2 and DQ8 alleles required for celiac disease, was likely lactose tolerant, and had no disease-causing variants for cystic fibrosis (CF).

The analyses presented in the paper have not only revealed fascinating insights into Beethoven's ancestry and possible medical issues, but also demonstrate the potential of genomic research to enhance our understanding of history and human biology.




REFERENCE

TJA Begg et al., ‘Genomic analyses of hair from Ludwig van Beethoven’, Current Biology (2023). 

Published:March 22, 2023DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.02.041




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