Yield gel evaluation of total DNA yield
This is a simple test. They take all of the DNA in the sample, and put it in a gel it can move through, but slowly, with more resistance based on the size of the strand. Then they expose it to an electric field so that the negatively charged DNA will move toward the far side of the gel. This sorts the DNA by size. This allows you to determine the quality of the DNA. DNA that is breaking down becomes a lot of shorter strands, so you’ll get a smear of DNA of all different sizes. DNA that is intact and from the same organism is all the same size, so it forms a nice tight band.
That is the result they reported, a tight band of “high molecular weight” which means anything over 20-25kb. They compared the amount of DNA in that band to the result they got from the QuantiBlot, and found that there was much more of it. That means that the primate DNA was a small proportion of the overall DNA in the sample! The tissue contained a tiny amount of human DNA, and a bunch DNA from some other organism.
The majority of the DNA in the sample is not human. This is a rather significant result that I have never heard Tesoriero mention. It also seems to be pretty much inexplicable if you believe this was an actual miracle. I certainly can’t come up with a reason you would conjure up a chunk of heart tissue clearly visible to the naked eye, sprinkle in a tiny handful of human cells, and have the rest of the cells be non-human.
So what is all of this DNA from? Unfortunately, this test doesn’t provide much information on that. We know that most of the DNA came from organisms with genomes over 25kb. The problem is that the genome of every organism is bigger than that. All animals, plants, fungi, bacteria would be in this band if their DNA was intact. Only some viruses are smaller.
Wheat?
Let’s start with the obvious source. The specimen started out as a communion wafer, made from wheat flour. The only ingredients in communion wafers are wheat flour and water. Water does not have DNA. Could the DNA be from the flour?
Wheat certainly has DNA, but most of it is in the germ, which is removed in processing white flour. Whole grain flour would contain more DNA, however most communion wafers are made with white flour. All of the images of communion wafers from this church show white wafers, not brown ones, and the images of this specimen appear to be a white wafer.
How much DNA would be in a white wafer? One study used 100mg samples of white flour, and found DNA concentrations between 24.8 and 80.9 ng/microlitre. That’s a much higher quantity than the amount of human DNA found by the quantiblot, but it’s still not high. And 100mg is about half a wafer according to my kitchen scale. This sample contained only about 1/3 of the sample Dr. Castanon took, which was only a small piece of red part of the host, which from the pictures looks like a small portion of the overall wafer.
Furthermore, another paper found that the DNA in flour is not high quality, presumably due to the processing. If you look at figure 1 in that paper you can see the results of an agarose gel electrophoresis on flour, just like the one done on the eucharist sample. Instead of a tight band at the top, you see a smear all the way down, indicating the DNA is broken. This is presumably due to the processing of the flour, and would only be increased by the additional processing to turn the flour into a communion wafer. So it is unlikely that the high quality DNA they found came from the flour.
Animal heart/tissue?
If there was fraud involved, maybe tissue from some non-human animal was used. Let’s consider the options.
You may have noticed on the Quantiblot page that I said the QuantiBlot gives the quantity of primate DNA, not just human DNA. So, if the Quantiblot test was definitively positive but the PCR STR could not find any distinctly human sequences, the narrative that Tesoriero is promoting, an obvious question is whether it could be a lemur. Or, more likely, a howler monkey, given that Buenos Aires is a major center in the illegal wildlife trade.
The details are a little bit more complicated. All primates have similar sequences in their centromeres to what the QuantiBlot tests for, but the sequences do vary. The only way to know for sure what the QuantiBlot would give a positive result for is to use the test on DNA from that animal. And as far as I can tell, the QuantiBlot has only ever been tested on a handful of animals, and humans are the only primate tested. So we can’t actually say, based on the data I could find, that a lemur would definitely test positive and a colugo would definitely test negative. It’s likely that at least the primates closest to us, the great apes would test positive though.
On the other hand, would the PCR STR test necessarily give negative results for a non-human primate? The AmpFlSTR Profiler Plus PCR Amplification Kit has been tested on other animals.
It found that gorilla, chimpanzee, and orangutan were significantly similar to humans for all of the tested STRs, so if the sample was a great ape, it should have given a positive result. They didn’t test any other primates. So, I don’t know how it would respond to a howler monkey, but it’s likely you’d get a result for at least some of the loci tested.
So I can’t be certain, but it’s likely that if primate tissue was used it would have given some result on both tests. The very low concentration of DNA found by the QuantiBlot could be from another primate, but that amount is so tiny that it’s probably contamination, and we know several humans handled the sample, and as far as I know it was never near any monkeys. But the unidentified DNA in the majority of the tissue is not likely to be from a primate because it would likely have given at least some positive results on one of the tests.
Could the tissue be from another animal? In the testing for the Profiler Plus, the dog, pig, cow and horse samples also produced a band for the Amelogenin. No band was reported for the Amelogenin, so that rules out a lot of animals you could get a heart from by asking your local butcher. However, there are some common animals known to be negative for both tests, including chicken, cat and mouse. Those animals are possibilities.
Bread Moulds?
All fungi and bacteria likely to be growing on that wafer would have DNA which would give these results. Most will also form long-lasting spores, allowing their DNA to be well preserved years after the wafer was sealed in a tube. Given that we can clearly see microorganisms growing on the wafer in the images, I consider this the most likely source.