Spooky Scary Skeleton, There's Proteins in His Breath

In case you weren't aware, Dracula is based on a real person, who was not a count, but a prince. He was the second son of Vlad Dracul of Wallachia (now Romania) and eventually became the ruler. Well, he became the ruler three separate times. The late 1400s had a ton of drama full of war, capture, broken alliances, and power struggles. If you want to know more about the full history, that's something well documented that you should be able to find some information about with a quick search.

Brahm Stoker's Count Dracula is based on rumors that spread surrounding Vlad's capture between his second and third rule. Rumors of his cruelty were widespread, a cruelty that started in his second rule over Wallachia. That cruelty is what inspired the Dracula character, but that is not the focus of today's post. We are talking about him today because through the power of science, it was discovered that he likely cried bloody tears due to a medical condition.

Some letters written by Vlad were analyzed using proteomics. Proteomics is a method of identifying proteins through a large-scale study of proteins. The proteome is the entire set of proteins produced or modified by an organism or system- similar to a genome, only instead of genes, it's proteins. Scientists were able to generate this information from the breath that Vlad left on the paper. Yes, that's odd, but think about how close your face is to a piece of paper when you write something down. You don't write and then walk away, you're going to read what you have written and you may even read it more than once. If the ink is still wet, what are you going to do? That's right, blow on the paper. Paper is porous, so it will hold cells and, in this case, it held preserved cells that were analyzed to discover that Vlad likely had haemolacria, a condition that causes a person to produce tears partially composed of blood.

The proteins also suggested that Vlad avoided meat, as the letters contained no traces of animal proteins. This discovery was made fairly recently in September of this year- just in time for Halloween. We suppose you can thank science and research for any nightmares you have given this new information about the father of modern vampires.

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