DNAprint Genomics (DNAG)

[mingwan0]

I don't remember seeing this article posted before:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/thisweek/story/0,12977,1210021,00.html

Can your DNA reveal where you're from?

David Adam
Thursday May 6, 2004
The Guardian

Not really, at least not yet. Although broad ethnic ancestry can be determined from our DNA, geneticists can't refine that information to say with certainty that an individual hails from a specific country. Or indeed the Caribbean, which is where the Metropolitan Police claimed last week that new DNA testing had placed the origins of a serial rapist known as the Minstead offender.

"Ancestral testing concluded that the Minstead offender's origins probably lie in the Caribbean," the Met's Simon Morgan said.

It sounds plausible, but this particular piece of sleuthing is beyond current technology. Who says so? The company that analysed the Met's sample. "That's not what our test indicated," says Zach Gaskin, technical director of forensics at DNAPrint Genomics in Florida.

Analysing DNA for telltale genetic markers can only reliably judge whether someone's background lies in one of four distinct historical population groups: East Asian, European, Native American and African. Beyond that, it's far trickier and a case of trying to judge the relative percentages of each and then comparing the results with people whose backgrounds are known.

This does at least allow certain possibilities to be ruled out. Will O'Reilly of the Met says they had reports that the attacker was black or of mixed race, and when DNAPrint compared the results with a database of 500 people, the markers did not match those from West Africa or those of mixed race. They were similar to those in African-American populations, but O'Reilly says the most likely match, given the population of south London, where the attacks took place, is African-Caribbean. Other geneticists helping the Met apparently agree; O'Reilly says one has even pinpointed the exact Caribbean island.

"That would be extremely difficult because they are very similar populations," warns Alec Jeffreys, the geneticist at Leicester University who pioneered DNA fingerprinting. The Met is not giving up; it has persuaded 200 African-Caribbean officers to submit samples to DNAPrint for comparison.