In light of these issues, the PLOS ONE Editors are concerned about the validity of the conclusions and the reproducibility of the results, and so we retract this article.

Furthermore, the Competing Interests statement for this article [ 1 ] should have declared that the sample was provided by the Shroud of Turin Education and Research Association Inc. (STERA).

In addition, the results of this article were based on analysis of a single fiber (approximately 1mm in length and 15μm in diameter) from the Turin Shroud. The reliance on a single small fiber taken from the Turin Shroud in 1978 calls into question the validity of statements in the Results and Conclusions sections which compare the new findings to those reported in previous studies of the Turin Shroud. It has not been demonstrated that findings from the fiber used in the PLOS ONE article can be generalized as applying to other samples taken from the Turin Shroud, or that contamination of the sample can be ruled out.

Based on our internal assessment and advice received from the Editorial Board members, the PLOS ONE Editors are concerned that there are not sufficient controls to support conclusions referring to human blood or physical trauma. For example, period ink and animal blood controls were not included in diffraction and STEM analyses, as would be needed to rule out alternate interpretations regarding the material on the fiber, and the creatinine findings do not provide definitive evidence of trauma or violence. Thus, we consider that the main conclusions of the article, including the following statements, are not sufficiently supported:

Concerns have been raised that the data presented in this article [ 1 ] are not sufficient to support the conclusions drawn; the provenance, integrity and availability of the material used for the study have also been questioned. In light of these issues, the PLOS ONE Editors reevaluated the published article in consultation with members of our Editorial Board.

Abstract We performed reproducible atomic resolution Transmission Electron Microscopy and Wide Angle X-ray Scanning Microscopy experiments studying for the first time the nanoscale properties of a pristine fiber taken from the Turin Shroud. We found evidence of biologic nanoparticles of creatinine bounded with small nanoparticles of iron oxide. The kind, size and distribution of the iron oxide nanoparticles cannot be dye for painting but are ferrihydrate cores of ferritin. The consistent bound of ferritin iron to creatinine occurs in human organism in case of a severe polytrauma. Our results point out that at the nanoscale a scenario of violence is recorded in the funeral fabric and suggest an explanation for some contradictory results so far published.

Citation: Carlino E, De Caro L, Giannini C, Fanti G (2017) Atomic resolution studies detect new biologic evidences on the Turin Shroud. PLoS ONE 12(6): e0180487. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0180487 Editor: Yogendra Kumar Mishra, Institute of Materials Science, GERMANY Received: March 8, 2017; Accepted: June 15, 2017; Published: June 30, 2017 Copyright: © 2017 Carlino et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Funding: The work was funded by Progetto Premiale MIUR 2013 USCEF DFM.AD006.077.001. There was no additional external funding received for this study. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction The Turin Shroud [1] (TS) is a handmade 3–1 twill linen cloth, 4.4 m long and 1.1 m wide, showing the double image of a dead body of a scourged, thorn-crowned man who was stabbed in the side and crucified [2]. It is believed by many that it was the burial cloth in which Jesus of Nazareth was wrapped about 2000 years ago. Conversely, others think that it is a fake. However, the TS image has not been explained nor reproduced so far by science [3], although some hypotheses have been proposed [4]. There are some indications [5] that the TS was in Palestine in the first century A.D. and then taken to Edessa, now Sanliurfa (TR). The similarity of many details of the TS face with the Christ on Byzantine coins in use from the VII century A.D. is a clue that the TS were already known during the Byzantine Empire [3]. After the Sac of Constantinople in 1204 the “Shroud of Christ” appeared in Europe in 1353 at Lirey (F) [5] and in 1532 at Chambéry (F) where it was fire damaged [6]. It was taken to Turin in 1578 where it is still now. In 1989 the linen fabric of the TS was radiocarbon dated to the Middle Ages [7]. This result is considered wrong by some authors claiming the presence of systematic errors [8]. Another work indicated an age for the TS “between 1300-and 3000-years old." [9] A mechanical analysis coupled with opto-chemical measurements has recently dated the TS to 90 AD ±200 years [10]. The TS shows [1–3] a pale yellow background fabric, the body image—devoid of pigments [1,2,11]—produced by a chemical reaction (dehydration and oxidation) [1,2,11], blood stains and other localized signs of minor interest like burns, water stains etc. [1–3]. In 1969 Cardinal Pellegrino appointed a commission to investigate if the red stains clearly visible on the TS were blood. In 1973, a discordant conclusion was obtained: “The negative response of the investigation does not allow an absolute judgment of exclusion of blood nature of the material” [12]. Subsequent analyses of some TS threads evidenced only the presence of red pigments compatible with red ochre and vermillion, [13] whereas other researchers found the evidence of blood [14,15,16,17]. A recent study [17] found both blood and pigments proposing a retouch for the faded bloodstains. In summary, there is a strong controversial about the TS authenticity due to contradictory results of scientific analyses. Up to now, to our knowledge, microscopic analyses on the TS were limited, at the best of times, to sub-micrometer spatial resolution. Here we present an atomic resolution study on a fiber of the TS performed by Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) and Wide Angle X-ray Scanning (WAXS) Microscopy. The fiber, of about two millimeters, comes from an area of the feet (dorsal image) containing some red crusts, of about one micrometer, visible by optical microscope [17]. TEM experiments were performed in areas of the fiber away from red crusts. TEM analyses show that the fiber is fully covered by creatinine nanoparticles, 20–100 nm in size, embedding small (2–6 nm) nanoparticles, made of defected ferrihydrite, typical of biologic ferritin cores. WAXS shows the presence of diffraction peaks of defected cellulose. Here we show how atomic resolution investigations unexpectedly discover a scenario of violence hidden at the nanoscale in the TS fiber and also suggest an explanation for the controversial results so far obtained. Indeed, a high level of creatinine and ferritin is related to patients suffering of strong polytrauma like torture. Hence, the presence of these biological nanoparticles found during our TEM experiments point a violent death for the man wrapped in the Turin shroud.

Materials and methods The fiber was provided by B. M. Schwortz [18], as part of the Shroud of Turin Education and Research Association, Inc. (STERA Inc). The fiber analyzed is taken from a sticky tape (1HB) applied to and lifted from the surface of the TS in 1978 [1]. We prepared the TEM specimen by placing the as received fiber, shown in Fig 1, in a folding 300x300 mesh Cu grid mounted on a further Cu grid previously covered by a thin C film “S1 Fig”. The measurements were performed in ultra-high vacuum of 7×10−6 Pa. PPT PowerPoint slide

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larger image TIFF original image Download: Fig 1. Light microscopy image. Low-magnification, light microscopy dark-field, epi-illumination image of a piece of fiber of the TS: the arrows indicate some of the red particles on the surface of the fiber recognized as blood [17]. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0180487.g001 TEM experiments were performed at room temperature by using a JEOL JEM 2010F UHR TEM/STEM. The equipment has a low spherical aberration coefficient objective pole piece (Cs = 0.47±0.01mm) and has been operated at an accelerating voltage of 200 kV resulting in a spatial resolution of 0.19 nm at optimum defocus in phase contrast High-Resolution Transmission Electron Microscopy (HRTEM) imaging [19]. Energy Dispersive X-rays Spectroscopy (EDXS) experiments were performed in Scanning TEM (STEM) configuration by scanning an electron probe of 0.2 nm in the area of interest. The sample is extremely sensitive to the high-energy electron beam and has a high degree of hydro-carbon contamination [19] due to the prolonged exposure of the TS to the environment. These two conditions impose the use of a proper tailored electron-optical configuration capable to deliver a low current density onto the specimen [19,20]. The TEM experimental set up here used to study the TS fiber has been only recently established during the studies of pristine drug nano-crystals [21,22]. Wide Angle X-ray Scanning Microscopy (WAXS) data were collected at the X-ray MicroImaging Laboratory (XMI-L@b) equipped with a Fr-E+ SuperBright rotating anode copper anode microsource (Cu Kα, λ = 0.15405 nm, 2475 W), a multilayer focusing optics (Confocal Max-Flux; CMF 15–105) and a three-pinhole camera (Rigaku SMAX-3000) [23]. For WAXS data collection an image plate detector with 100μm pixel size was placed at 28mm from the sample and calibrated by means of the Si NIST standard reference material (SRM 640b) [24].

Discussions There is a strange occurrence that we noted during all of our TEM studies. In fact, although HRTEM experiments evidenced how the dark small nanoparticles are made of ferrihydrite, nevertheless in all of our TEM experiments, the peculiar spacing of iron oxide at 0.25 nm [28] was oddly never observed. The absence of the 0.25nm spacing could be due to the interaction between the small iron-oxide particles and the particle embedding them, which from one side prevented their modification during the centuries due to the interaction with the external environment, but could have affected some of the peculiar crystal features of the iron oxide clusters. Indeed, the explanation comes from some recent studies on the binding between creatinine and urea with iron-oxide nanoparticles investigated, in a completely different field, for possible application in dialysis to reduce waste molecules accumulation in blood [38]. In particular X-ray studies on iron oxide nanoparticles tagged with urea and creatinine indicate exactly a suppression of the Bragg diffraction peak corresponding to the 0.25nm spacing [38]. We hence focused our attention to identify the structure of the big embedding nanoparticles comparing their HRTEM images and diffractograms with the relevant full dynamical calculations of diffraction patterns for urea and creatinine [39]. As a result, all the identified diffractograms belong to creatinine. A representative example of our findings is shown in Fig 6 (see also S5 Fig for other examples). PPT PowerPoint slide

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larger image TIFF original image Download: Fig 6. Characterization of creatinine particles a): HRTEM image; b): magnified view of the square region marked in a); c): diffractogram of b); d): simulation of the diffraction pattern of creatinine in [1–10] zone axis with reported the lattice spacing relevant to the observed intensities. The yellow and pale-blue circles in the diffraction pattern simulation mark the corresponding circles around the experimental spots in c). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0180487.g006 We measured the diffractogram (Fig 6, panel c) in the area marked by a square in the relevant HRTEM image (panel a) and shown at higher magnification in panel b). In the TEM experiments we focused the attention on those particles oriented with respect to the electron beam to excite more than one pair of reflections. This enables to unambiguously identify the relevant zone axis and material structure [40,21,22]. The diffractogram in Fig 6 belongs to creatinine oriented along the [1–10] crystallographic zone axis with respect to the direction of the direct electron beam, as demonstrated by the relevant diffraction pattern simulation shown in Fig 6D. In the latter, for ease of reading, we highlighted those reflections that enable the identification of the creatinine removing the systematic reflections that are not transmitted, or poorly transmitted, by the contrast transfer function of the objective lens [19,20]. The yellow and pale-blue circles in the diffraction pattern simulation mark the corresponding circles around the experimental spots in Fig 6C. The yellow circles and the pale-blue circles in the diffractogram point two independent pairs of reflections, whose spacing is respectively of 0.59nm and 0.23nm, forming a reciprocal space angle of 94 degrees. These two Friedel’s pair correspond respectively to (002) and (22–1) spots of creatinine, as shown in the relevant simulation. Other examples, also in other particle crystallographic orientations, are given in S5 Fig. Hence, on the basis of the experimental evidences, the particles covering the TS fiber are creatinine nanoparticles with inside biological ferritin cores of ferrihydrate. The lack of the 0.25nm spacing evidenced during our experiments is due to the bond between ferrihydrate cores and creatinine in agreement with the evidences in the x-ray spectra of the creatinine bounded to iron oxide nanoparticles where the peak corresponding to the spacing at 0.25nm is suppressed by the interaction between the protein and the iron [38]. This is not a situation typical of the blood serum of a healthy human organism. High levels of creatinine in the blood are observed in the case of strong trauma. There is a wide recent literature reporting on interaction between creatinine and ferritin in fatal accidents [41,42] or as a consequence of the rhabdomyolysis due to torture [43]. Indeed, De Abreu et al. report in [41] a study on acute kidney injury (AKI) after trauma, mostly in accidents involving cars and motorcycles, evidencing how AKI is secondary to severe crush injuries and rhabdomyolysis. In particular, the patients with AKI present a high level of creatinine and ferritin in the blood serum. High level of creatinine are also in the case reported by Schwartz et al [42] in the study of patients of emergency room with skeletal muscle trauma. Indeed, when muscle cells are destroyed as a consequence of a strong trauma, such as the torture, they release their content into the bloodstream as reported in [43]. One of the chemicals largely released is myoglobin [43]. The creatinine strongly binds to the iron nanoparticles [38] of the ferritin and this relationship is hence a signature of the occurrence of a strong polytrauma.

Conclusions On the basis of the experimental evidences of our atomic resolution TEM studies, the man wrapped in the TS suffered a strong polytrauma. We studied a fiber of the TS by atomic resolution TEM experiments and WAXS. This is the first time that the TS is studied at this resolution and this range of view produced a series of experimental results, which thanks to recent studies on ancient dye painting, ferritin, creatinine and human pathology can be connected and understood in relationship with a macroscopic scenario in which the TS was committed [41,42,43]. In fact, the fiber was soaked with a blood serum typical of a human organism that suffered a strong trauma, as HRTEM evidenced that the TS is covered by well-dispersed 30nm-100nm creatinine nanoparticles bounded with internal 2nm-6nm ferrihydrate structures. The bond between the iron cores of ferritin and creatinine on large scale occurs in a body after a strong polytrauma [41,42,43]. This result cannot be impressed on the TS by using ancient dye pigments, as they have bigger sizes and tend to aggregate, and it is highly unlikely that the eventual ancient artist would have painted a fake by using the hematic serum of someone after a heavy polytrauma. Nevertheless, the presence of red pigments, detected in some studies [13,17] seems to indicate a human intervention on the TS. This, in turn, has generated some difficulties for the modern investigations and stimulated the scientific debate about the actual origin of the TS. The analyses discussed in literature so far, have been realized without the necessary spatial resolution to distinguish what is coming from the nanoscale and cannot filter eventual artifacts. This has been the target of our work and the obtained results are not compatible with a painting but evidenced the presence of nanoparticles of pathologic blood serum related to the presence of creatinine bound with ferrihydrate, which are typical of an organism that suffered a strong polytrauma, like torture. Indeed, unexpectedly, at the nanoscale it is encoded a scenario of great suffering recorded on the nanoparticles attached to the linen fibers. Furthermore, here the experiments point how the nanoscale enable to study unspoiled properties of the Turin Shroud suggesting an effective experimental strategy for further studies.

Acknowledgments The work was funded by Progetto Premiale Ministero Italiano Universita’ e Ricerca (MIUR) 2013 USCEF DFM.AD006.077.001, Principal investigator E. Carlino. There was no additional external funding received for this study. Shroud of Turin Education and Research Association Inc. (STERA Inc.), represented by B. Schwortz, is acknowledged for providing the sticky tape containing the fiber of the Turin Shroud. Acknowledgments are due to D. Altamura, T. Sibillano and R. Lassandro for the support in the XMI-L@b.