https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/ysm-faculty-recognized-with-yale-faculty-innovation-awards/
Posts Tagged ‘plight’
YSM Researchers Recognized with Yale Faculty Innovation Awards | Yale School of Medicine
December 23, 2025The study of ancient DNA is helping to solve modern crimes
November 2, 2024v. related to plight + deconvolution
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Dr Willerslev had been able to obtain SNPs from Meng’s trousers. Then came the task of trying to identify whom they could have come from. In 2023 a man called Philip Patrick Westh was arrested in connection with a kidnapping case in the same area; because of similarities between the cases, the police believed that he had killed Meng too (Mr Westh denies most of the accusations related to the kidnapping case and pleaded not guilty to the charge of killing Meng). To assess the probability that the genetic material from Meng’s trousers had come from Mr Westh, Dr Willerslev made use of a DNA database of ordinary, healthy Danes. If the SNPs found on the trousers were identical to those in Mr Westh’s DNA, went the logic, and enough of them were sufficiently rare variants, the probability that they did indeed come from Mr Westh went up. Dr Willerslev testified that this particular pattern of SNP variants would be at least one million times more likely to turn up if the sample included DNA from Mr Westh, or a close relative, than if it did not.
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But identifying a suspect from SNPs is another matter. Degraded samples can be extremely complex to analyse, says Dr Simonsen, in particular if material from several people has been mixed together. There are no standardised forensic protocols for separating out those signals, nor for how to confidently calculate the probability that the DNA belongs to a suspect. That matters because the stakes are somewhat higher in a criminal case than in the study of mammoths and dodos. But, says Dr Simonsen, “We expect that nut to be cracked.” He hopes to learn from Dr Willerslev’s team and develop new forensic tools. The work has already started: in September, researchers from Aalborg University and the University of Copenhagen, with whom he
collaborates, published a paper describing an approach for doing identification calculations based on SNPs.
He is not the only one to see potential. An American company called Astrea Forensics has recently spun out from the palaeogenomics group at the University of California in Santa Cruz, to offer aDNA expertise to law enforcement. Their speciality is the nuclear DNA found within hair, which has long been considered too fragmented and scarce to be of any use.
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Your DNA Can Now Be Pulled From Thin Air. Privacy Experts Are Worried. – The New York Times
September 28, 2024quite relevant to plight & deconvolution
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Over the last decade, wildlife researchers have refined techniques for recovering environmental DNA, or eDNA — trace amounts of genetic material that all living things leave behind….The eDNA technology is also used in wastewater surveillance systems to monitor Covid and other pathogens.
But all along, scientists using eDNA were quietly recovering gobs and gobs of human DNA. To them, it’s pollution, a sort of human genomic bycatch muddying their data. But what if someone set out to collect human eDNA on purpose?
New DNA collecting techniques are “like catnip” for law enforcement officials, says Erin Murphy, a law professor at the New York University School of Law who specializes in the use of new
technologies in the criminal legal system. The police have been quick to embrace unproven tools, like using DNA to create probability-based sketches of a suspect.
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As a proof of concept in one of their experiments, the researchers scooped up a soda-can-size sample of water from a creek in St. Augustine, Fla. They then fed the genetic material from the sample through a nanopore sequencer, which allows researchers to read longer stretches of DNA. The one they used cost about $1000, is the size of a cigarette lighter and plugs into a laptop like a flash drive.
From the samples, the team recovered much more legible human DNA than they had anticipated. And as knowledge expands about human genetics, analysis of even limited samples can reveal a wealth of information. …
That highlights the possibility that law enforcement officials could use eDNA collected at crime scenes to incriminate people, even though wildlife ecologists who developed the techniques say the science isn’t mature enough for such purposes. Scientists have yet to pin down the fundamentals of eDNA, like how it travels through air or water or how it degrades over time. And nanopore sequencing — the technology that allowed Dr. Duffy’s team to find longer and more informative DNA fragments — still has a much higher error rate than older
technologies, meaning an unusual genetic signature that seems like a promising lead could be a red herring.
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“There’s an imbalance in almost all systems of the world between what law enforcement is allowed to do, versus publicly funded research, versus private companies,” said Barbara Prainsack, a professor at the University of Vienna who studies the regulation of DNA technology in medicine and forensics.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/science/environmental-dna-ethics-privacy.html
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