The BBC reports that ambitious new techniques are being used to identify a sex offender. The initial geographical narrowing was accomplished via a comparison at Florida's DNAPrint genomics. Samples from up to 200 police officers of a related geographic origin will be further used to narrow down the offender, or at least his family.
Assuming these techniques meet success, the next logical step would be to attempt to correlate DNA samples with known family relations, such as the database provided by Mormon genealogy database. Already AncestryByDNA, apparently a DNAPrint spinoff, offers a service to identify the ancestral origins of clients, broken down by "major historical population groups", which they identify as the heritable component of "race".
As more individuals are sampled and added to the combined databases, in principle it will require yet fewer additional collected samples to narrow a person down. Cuckoldry and unreported adoptions will be among the sources of error that such an effort would have to cope with.
Apparently depending on technique, thirteen regions or ten markers are used for comparison. Depending on the extent of variation in these regions of the genome, it may be eventually feasible to deploy rapid assay technologies enabling law enforcement to perform a check in the field within minutes thanks to nanotech advances.
No comments:
Post a Comment