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Comment by gtsnexp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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