Mitochondrial DNA analysis on remains of a putative son of Louis XVI, King of France and Marie-Antoinette.

Carl Wilhelm Naundorff was buried in 1845 in Delft as Louis Charles, Duc de Normandie, 'Louis XVII'. However, the son of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette-Louis XVII--officially died in the Temple of Paris in 1795. In order to resolve the identity of Naundorff, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) D-loop sequences of his remains were compared with the sequences obtained from the hairs of two sisters of Marie-Antoinette, Marie-Antoinette herself, and with the sequences obtained from DNA samples of two living maternal relatives. The mtDNA sequence of a bone sample from Naundorff showed two nucleotide differences from the sequences of the three sisters and four differences from the sequences of living maternal relatives. Based on this evidence it becomes very unlikely that Naundroff is the son of Marie-Antoinette.

Analysis of the registry of toxic effects of chemical substances (RTECS) files and conversion of the data in these files for input to the environmental chemicals data and information network (ECDIN).

A data bank for environmental chemicals, ECDIN, is being developed at the Joint Research Centre of the European Communities in cooperation with universities and research institutes in the nine member states as a part of the Environmental Research Programme of the EC. During the pilot phase of the project, data from the Registry of Toxic Effects of Chemical Substances have been incorporated into the data bank. Conversions of the data into ECDIN input format was necessary before inclusion of the toxicity data in ECDIN, and the computer programs used for this format conversion have produced various statistics for the contents of the RTECS files. Analyses of the data in three editions of RTECS are presented.