Using ancient DNA as a forensic proxy: George Baehr, the architect of the Dresdner Frauenkirche

For historic individuals, the outward appearance and characteristics remain non-resolved. Unfortunately, photographic or evenwritten material is only scarcely available for many cases. Attempts to study historic individuals with genetic data so far focusedon hypervariable regions of mitochondrial DNA and to some extent on complete mitochondrial DNA. To elucidate the potentialof in-solution based SNP capture methods - as now widely applied in population genetics - we extracted DNA from the remainsof George Bähr, the architect of the Dresdner Frauenkirche. We were able to identify his remains to be of male origin, showingsufficient DNA damage and being thus likely authentic. Furthermore, we were able to show that George Bähr had light skinpigmentation and most likely brown eyes, corresponding to modern human variation present in the area. We see this analysisas an example to demonstrate the prospects that new in-solution SNP capture methods can provide for forensic cases ofhistoric interest, using methods well established in ancient DNA (aDNA) research and population genetics