DNAprint Genomics (DNAG)

[mingwan0]

James F. Crow, is Professor Emeritus of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Amongst other things he is chair of the National Research Council Commission on Life Sciences Committee on DNA Forensic Science.

Some comments from the National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence Research & Development Working Group (Chair, James F. Crow) Final Report, (July 10, 2000):

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/dnamtgtrans10/trans-8.html

Looking a little further into the future, one of the wishes of our committee or at least several members of you are as far as possible to avoid group identification. We're all conscious of the political overtones, social overtones, legal overtones of genetic profiling or racial profiling, so maybe the less we can use of racial statements in connection with that identification of people perhaps the better.

I think it's possible in the future to make DNA identification without too much specification as to what race the person belongs to, what major group a person belongs to. One thing to do is we have several different, five or so, ethnic groups in the state. You can test all five of them without asking which one the person belongs to. Another step which could be done is to have a uniform database cover everybody stratified by regular makeup in the United States and then use a large evaluator corrective factor to take advantage of the fact that there is more substructure in whatever one of the population is treated this way than otherwise.

What about using DNA to identify the racial origin of a group? You could do pretty well right now with the 13 loci, but there is very little reason to do it. It might help in narrowing the circle of suspects, and that could be done right now. It can be done better with a large number of markers. We're more interested, however, in asking about the detection of particular traits, and right now there are a few traits that could be identified, bald or color blind. I'll soon run out of these because there aren't very many known single traits, but right now there are a few that can be used.

Undoubtedly this wonderful DNA project is going to turn up more genes, and perhaps within ten years it will be possible to make a pretty good description of a person typically from a DNA sample.

On August 29th - 30th 2003 the 2nd annual Forensic Bioinformatics Conference on Statistics and DNA Profiling was held at Wright State University:

http://bioforensics.com/conference/conference.html

This was the one that had the DNA Witness racial profiling presentation:

http://bioforensics.com/conference/Racial%20Identification/index.html

One of the suggested background reading papers for attendees of this conference was "DNA forensics: past, present, and future" by Professor Crow. This paper is also from 2000. Here are some excerpts:

http://bioforensics.com/conference/Welcome/crow2.pdf

SOME OTHER POSSIBILITIES FOR THE FUTURE

Inferring Geographical Ancestry. It is already possible, with the 13 Core STR loci, that some profiles are appreciably more frequent in one geographical group than in another. If a profile were 100 times as likely in the Caucasian population as in Hispanics, this could help narrow the range of suspects searched. If this is done, it would be well to consider the background population frequency, used as a prior probability. I should emphasize that this is only probabilistic and is of value only in preliminary identification, not in establishing evidence of a common source of evidence and suspect DNAs.

Individual Traits. As a result of the genome project and other genetic research, more and more gene determined individual traits are being identified. In the near future we can expect that genes for eye pigment, hair color, baldness, skin pigment, color-blindness, albinism, and others will have been identified. This is an area that is being intensively researched at present. It would be rash to predict, but it seems likely that a profile that could be useful in the search for suspects will be found in the near future.

So, leaving aside baldness and color blindness, which he identified in the Future of DNA Evidence Report as traits that could already be identified, we are left with eye pigment, hair color, skin pigment and albinism. Interesting that he singled out those traits. It could just be that they are the most informative. It is also possible that he was aware of work being undertaken by a colleague of one of the National Research Council Commission on Life Sciences Committee on DNA Forensic Science members:

http://www4.nas.edu/news.nsf/isbn/0309053951?OpenDocument

Masatoshi Nei, Ph.D.
Evan Pugh Professor of Biology and Director
Institute of Molecular Evolutionary Genetics
Pennsylvania State University