Proteomic Analysis of Vlad III the Impaler's Documents | Hacker News Reader

Proteomic Analysis of Vlad III the Impaler's Documents

pubs.acs.org

43 pointsgniv16 comments

"Hubristic scientists extracted biological material from Dracula's correspondence" is a solid concept for a horror story.

That headline bought to mind a very strong image of Vlad the Impaler sitting at a desk fiddling around with settings in Word to get the font spacing he wanted.

And then impaling his IT guy when Word yet again automatically formats something into a list despite having turned that off in the settings.

"Notice you're writing in Transylvanian Times New Roman. Need assistance inserting bat-shaped bullet points?" — Clippy

The Osaka Castle museum has a special floor where no photography is allowed. On this floor are many of Toyotomi Hideyoshi's personal effects, including articles of his samurai armor and letters he sent to or received from others.

It's kind of staggering to look at the characters on a page and imagine Toyotomi shaping them individually with his brush. Shaping Japanese history in the process.

chronology checks out. Due to issues with fonts and spacing Vlad didn't even impale anyone until his mid-30ies. Never give up and follow your dreams!

Fraktur do be like that tho

I found the whole thing fascinating, although a bit hard to read due to all the jargon. I recommend reading the last two sections, Discussion and Conclusions.

Edit: Are there bloggers or youtubers who explain these processes in a more accessible way?

The paper suggests specific health conditions for Vlad the Impaler based solely on the presence of certain peptides and proteins. This is a very fragile link, particularly without the benefit of transcriptome or sequencing data to provide context for these molecular markers. Mass spectrometry, while useful for protein characterisation, doesn't necessarily offer insights into the functional relevance of these proteins in the context of health or disease.

I would argue that mass spectrometry based proteomics is capable of offering much better insight into functional relevance than transcriptomics. Proteins carry out function... and mRNA levels are only loosely coupled to protein levels (at best, expect an R^2 < 0.4). Why measure RNA when what you really care about are proteins? People just do transcriptomics because it's cheap.

This particular paper has flaws - as you mentioned, only a very small number of peptides are measured. I work on proteomics, and I remember this discussion from when the paper was initially published: https://mstdn.social/@pwilmart@scicomm.xyz/11087205681645628...

Paleoproteomics isn't what I would call well developed at this stage. How do we know that the peptides that were detected were actually from Vlad? Many people may have handled the letters over the years.

> How do we know that the peptides that were detected were actually from Vlad? Many people may have handled the letters over the years.

The authors acknowledge that it's a possibility. But there are mitigating circumstances. From the article: "the Sibiu Archive was founded in 1465 and it has been officially operating since that year. So, the two well-preserved documents of 1475 immediately began to be stored in the city’s official archive."

For me, the conclusions about the potential diseases are interesting, but not terribly so. I just find it remarkable how many bits of information we can now extract from old uncontaminated [1] documents. Viruses, bacteria, fungi, insects. And the conclusions we can draw from these.

[1] The authors seem to have gone to great length to verify that the letters were not contaminated. Among other things, they created and touched a modern letter, which they also analyzed. Remarkably only 20 peptides were in common between old and new.

This is a text book example of why "blind studies" are important, because this result just smacks of people looking for something clever to say about Dracula so they can get attention. For this result to be at all believable, they'd need to demonstrate they they can find evidence of those diseases in known carriers in a blind study, and then pick out dracula as a carrier in a similar study without knowing who he is.

The explination for his behaviour is quite simple and doesn't necessarily have to be explained through disease: his childhood spent on rhe road through Western states and then at the Sultan Murad the 2nd court. He saw lots of violence and hated obedience towards the sultan. Of course he wanted to impale just about any ottomans after that. The rest are stories made up by the tradespeople who did not want to pay taxes to him.

Impressive technical feat, but speculative conclusions. Trace peptides don't diagnose complex conditions. Likely multiple handlers, lacks definitive mutations linking Vlad the Impaler's conditions to the document. Non-invasive sampling is cool, but diagnosing Vlad seems an overreach. Clues, not decisive proof.

> has been exponentially increasing since the beginning of the new millennium

A part of me suffers everytime someone uses that expression

Reply on news.ycombinator.com