In the message, Ankhesenamun says that she was very afraid, but would not take one of her own people as husband. The letters do not say how Tutankhamun died. The Amarna letters indicate that Tutankhamun's wife, recently widowed, wrote to the Hittite king Suppiluliuma I, asking if she could marry one of his sons. With the death of Tutankhamun and the two stillborn children buried with him, the Thutmosid family line came to an end. However their exact contribution to the causality of his death still is highly debated. Genetic testing for STEVOR, AMA1, or MSP1 genes specific for Plasmodium falciparum revealed indications of malaria tropica in 4 mummies, including Tutankhamun's. Several pathologies including Köhler disease II were diagnosed in Tutankhamun none alone would have caused death. STR analysis based DNA fingerprinting analysis combined with the other techniques have rejected the hypothesis of gynecomastia and craniosynostoses (e.g., Antley-Bixler syndrome) or Marfan syndrome, but an accumulation of malformations in Tutankhamun's family was evident.

Three international experts served as consultants: Carsten Pusch of the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Germany Albert Zink of the EURAC-Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Bolzano, Italy and Paul Gostner of the Central Hospital Bolzano. Some geneticists dispute these findings, however, and 'complain that the team used inappropriate analysis techniques.'Ī research team, consisting of Egyptian scientists Yehia Gad and Somaia Ismail from the National Research Centre in Cairo, conducted further CT scans under the direction of Ashraf Selim and Sahar Saleem of the Faculty of Medicine at Cairo University. Queen Tiye held much political influence at court and acted as an adviser to her son after the death of her husband. Her DNA proved that, like his father, she was a child of Amenhotep III and Tiye thus, Tutankhamun's parents were brother and sister. The young king's mother was found through the DNA testing of a mummy designated as 'The Younger Lady' (KV35YL), which was found lying beside Queen Tiye in the alcove of KV35. The team was able to establish with a probability of better than 99.99 percent that Amenhotep III was the father of the individual in KV55, who was in turn the father of Tutankhamun. His mother was one of his father's five sisters, although it is not known which one. The results from the DNA samples finally put to rest questions about Tutankhamun's lineage, proving that his father was Akhenaten, but that his mother was not one of Akhenaten's known wives.

In 2008, a team began DNA research on Tutankhamun and the mummified remains of other members of his family.

My Little French Cousin Malajuven