Category Archives: DNA

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The scene in Rosslyn Avenue, Sunderland, after an explosion at a house.

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Police on Goose Lane bridge which goes over the M11 motorway near Birchanger which is closed after a van driver was killed in a motorway crash after what "appears to be a lump of concrete" struck his windscreen and his vehicle hit a tree.

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Emergency services at the scene in Lavender Hill, southwest London, after a bus left the road and hit a shop.

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A car on fire in the North Queen Street area of Belfast, close to the site of a contentious bonfire. The car was torched shortly after 10pm on Monday night

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A post-Brexit trade deal with the US could see a massive increase in the amount of cancer-causing toxins in British milk and baby food

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Acts gather amongst the crowds at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh.

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New world 100m champion Justin Gatlin pays respect to Usain Bolt after the Jamaicans last solo race

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Katarina Johnson-Thompson of Great Britain (Lane 6) and Carolin Schafer of Germany (Lane 7) and their opponants compete in the Women's Heptathlon 100 metres hurdles during day two of the 16th IAAF World Athletics Championships London 2017 at The London Stadium.

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Taoiseach Leo Varadkar is greeted by PSNI and Garda police officers representative of the gay community as he attends a Belfast Gay Pride breakfast meeting in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The Irish Prime Minister is on a two day visit to the province having already met with DUP leader Arlene Foster yesterday. The DUP, Northern Ireland's largest political party have so far blocked attempts to legalise gay marriage.

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Members of Unite employed by Serco at Barts Health NHS Trust, on strike over pay, protest outside Serco's presentation of financial results at JP Morgan, in London.

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Athletics - IAAF World Athletics Championships Preview - London, Britain - August 3, 2017 Great Britain's Mo Farah takes a photo in the stadium

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Britain's Bank of England Governor, Mark Carney, addresses journalists during a press conference to deliver the quarterly inflation report in London, August 3, 2017. REUTERS

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Bank of England and British Airways workers stage a protest outside the Bank of England in the City of London.

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Britain's Prince Philip, in his role as Captain General, Royal Marines, attends a Parade to mark the finale of the 1664 Global Challenge, on the Buckingham Palace Forecourt, in central London, Britain.The 96-year-old husband of Britain's Queen Elizabeth, made his final solo appearance at the official engagement on Wednesday, before retiring from active public life.

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Jamaica's Usain Bolt gestures during a press conference prior to Bolt's last World Championship, in east London

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Riders wait at the start on Horse Guards Parade in central London ahead of the "Prudential RideLondon-Surrey Classic 2017", UCI World Tour cycle race in London.

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Horse and riders take part in the Riding of the Marches ford on the River Esk, alongside the Roman Bridge in Musselburgh, East Lothian, during the annual Musselburgh Festival organised by the Honest Toun's Association.

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A wide view of play during day two of the 3rd Investec Test match between England and South Africa at The Kia Oval

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A nurse shows a message on his phone to colleagues as they take part in a protest near Downing Street in London. The Royal College of Nursing have launched a series of demonstrations, as part of their 'Summer of Protest' campaign against the 1 percent cap on annual pay rises for most NHS staff

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Connie Yates, mother of terminally-ill 11-month-old Charlie Gard, arrives at the Royal Courts of Justice in London on where a High Court judge is set to decide where baby Charlie Gard will end his life

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UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson gestures while posing for a photograph at the Sydney Opera House, in Sydney. Johnson is there to attend AUKMIN, the annual meeting of UK and Australian Foreign and Defence Ministers.

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Britain Prime Minister Theresa May walks with her husband Philip in Desenzano del Garda, by the Garda lake, as they holiday in northern Italy

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England team players pose after winning the ICC Women's World Cup cricket final between England and India at Lord's cricket ground in London

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Rajeshwari Gayakwad of India attempts to run out Jenny Gunn of England during the ICC Women's World Cup 2017 Final between England and India at Lord's Cricket Ground in London

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Chris Froome, wearing the overall leader's yellow jersey, celebrates on the podium after the twentieth stage of the Tour de France cycling race, an individual time trial over 22.5 kilometers (14 miles) with start and finish in Marseille, France.

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Competitors take part in the swim stage during the AJ Bell London Triathlon 2017 at Royal Victoria Docks in London, England. The 21st annual AJ Bell Triathlon sees 13000 competitors take part in the world's largest triathlon.

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Environment Secretary Michael Gove looks at screens in the information pod in the forest zone at the WWF Living Planet Centre in Woking, after he told an audience of environmental and countryside organisations that Brexit gives scope for Britain to be a global leader in green policy

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Screen grabbed image taken from video issued by NATS showing air traffic over the UK yesterday at 12:15pm, with red representing departures, yellow arrivals, purple domestic and blue overflights. Air traffic controllers are dealing with the busiest day in the UK's aviation history. A total of 8,800 planes are to be handled by controllers across the country over 24 hours, at the start of a summer season which is due to see a record 770,000 flights in UK airspace - 40,000 more than last year

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Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon shows off his cufflinks after cutting steel on the first Type 26 frigate at BAE System's Govan Shipyard near Glasgow.

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Britain's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson looks at a bipedal humanoid robot Wabian2 at Research Institute for Science and Engineering at Waseda University's Kikuicho Campus in Tokyo

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Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon during her visit to the site of Aberdeen Harbour's expansion into Nigg Bay

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Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson arrives at Downing Street for the weekly cabinet meeting

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Daniel Goodfellow and Tom Daley of Great Britain compete during the Men's Diving 10M Synchro Platform, preliminary round on day four of the Budapest 2017 FINA World Championships on July 17, 2017 in Budapest, Hungary

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Britain's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson speaks to the press upon his arrival at the European Council for the Foreign Affairs Council in Brussels

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Switzerland's Roger Federer holds aloft the winner's trophy after beating Croatia's Marin Cilic in their men's singles final match, during the presentation on the last day of the 2017 Wimbledon Championships at The All England Lawn Tennis Club in Wimbledon, southwest London. Roger Federer won 6-3, 6-1, 6-4.

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Garbine Muguruza of Spain celebrates victory with the trophy after the Ladies Singles final against Venus Williams of The United States on day twelve of the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Championships at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club at Wimbledon.

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The hearse departs St Joseph's Church after the funeral service for six year old Sunderland FC fan, Bradley Lowery on in Hartlepool, England. Bradley was diagnosed with neuroblastoma aged only 18 months. Hundreds of people lined the streets to pay their respects to the Sunderland football supporter who lost his battle with cancer last Friday.

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The EU chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, right, receives an Arsenal football top from Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn prior to a meeting at EU headquarters in Brussels

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Cotswolds village residents shocked after DNA tests show they are less than 50% British - The Independent

DNA extracted from turkey bones buried in the Mesa Verde region before migration from that area and DNA collected from the northern Rio Grande region before and after Mesa Verde was abandoned is cited in a new study which suggests a strong connection between contemporary Tewa Pueblo people in New Mexico and the Pueblo people who lived in Mesa Verde before its collapse. (Camera file photo )

DNA from domesticated turkeys has been used to track the mass exodus of ancestral Pueblo people from Mesa Verde in the late 13th century to the northern Rio Grande north of Santa Fe, N.M., according to a University of Colorado news release.

CU assistant professor Scott Ortman, one of four lead authors on a study documenting the research in a recent issue of the science journal PLOS ONE, said good evidence has been found supporting a substantial influx of turkeys into the northern Rio Grande region that had the same genetic composition as turkeys from the Mesa Verde region.

"This is a new line of evidence suggesting a strong connection between contemporary Tewa Pueblo people in New Mexico and the Pueblo people who lived in Mesa Verde country before its collapse," Ortman said.

The study included co-authors from Washington State University, the University of California, Davis and the University of Oklahoma.

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CU Boulder researcher uses turkey DNA to shed light on ancestral Pueblo people - Boulder Daily Camera

An updated version of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technique has set its sights on RNA-associated diseases.

Researchers from the University of California San Diego School of Medicine have developed a new technique known as RNA-targeting Cas9 (RCas9) to correct molecular mistakes that can lead to microsatellite repeat expansion diseases including myotonic dystrophy types 1 and 2the most common form of hereditary ALS and Huntingtons disease.

This is exciting because we're not only targeting the root cause of diseases for which there are no current therapies to delay progression but we've re-engineered the CRISPR-Cas9 system in a way that's feasible to deliver it to specific tissues via a viral vector, senior author Gene Yeo, Ph.D., professor of cellular and molecular medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine, said in a statement.

Microsatellite repeat expansion diseases are causes by errant repeats in RNA sequences that are toxic to the cell because they prevent production of crucial proteins.

Repetitive RNAs will accumulate in the nucleus or cytoplasm of cells to form dense knots called foci.

During the study, the researchers used the new technique to eliminate problem-causing RNAs associated with microsatellite repeat expansion diseases in patient-derived cells and cellular models of the diseases.

Under normal circumstances researchers will design a guide RNA to match the sequence of a specific target gene. The RNA will direct the Cas9 enzyme to the desired spot in the genome to cut the DNA.

The cell repairs the DNA break imprecisely, inactivating the gene. The researchers also can replace the section adjacent to the cut with a corrected version of the gene. RCas9 will work similarly, but the guide RNA directs Cas9 to an RNA molecule instead of DNA.

In the laboratory, the researchers tested the new technique on microsatellite repeat expansion disease RNAs and found that 95 percent or more of the RNA foci linked to myotonic dystrophy type 1 and type 2 one type of ALS and Huntingtons disease were eliminated.

RCas9 also reversed 93 percent of MBNL1a protein that normally binds RNA but is sequestered away from hundreds of its natural RNA targets by the RNA foci in myotonic dystrophy type 1in patient muscles cells and the cells ultimately resembled healthy control cells.

However, challenges must be overcome before RCas9 could be used on patients, as efficient delivery of RCas9 to patient cells is not yet perfected. Non-infectious adeno-associated viruses are commonly used in gene therapy but are too small to hold Cas9 to target DNA.

The researchers developed a smaller version of Cas9 by deleting regions of the protein that were necessary for DNA cleavage but dispensable for binding RNA.

The main thing we don't know yet is whether or not the viral vectors that deliver RCas9 to cells would elicit an immune response, Yeo said. Before this could be tested in humans, we would need to test it in animal models, determine potential toxicities and evaluate long-term exposure.

The study was published in Cell.

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DNA Editing Technique Corrects Defects in RNA-Associated Diseases - R & D Magazine

They say he was done in by his dookie.

Police inThousand Oaks, California, used DNA found in an unflushed toilet to finger a burglary suspect.

Andrew David Jensen,42, was arrested on July 28 on suspicion of committing a burglary last October.

Detectives managed to sniff out the suspect after they found some fecal matter in a toilet at the crime scene and had it tested forDNA, according to the Ventura County Star.

The sample was sent to the Ventura County Sheriffs Office Forensic Services Bureau for processing before being submitted to theCombined DNA Information System to see if there was a match with a known suspect.

Most people dont assume or dont know that DNA can be obtained by other things besides hair and saliva, Ventura County Sheriffs Office Detective Tim Lohman told the BBC. We look for any type of evidence that might be left behind.Whether its a smoked cigarette or a can that may be left behind, we will analyze it.

Ventura County Sheriff

Police got a DNA match on July 25 for Jensen, who they tracked down to his home in nearby Ventura.

He was arrested three days later on suspicion of first-degree residential burglary, a felony, according to the Associated Press.His bail was set at $180,000.

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DNA From Unflushed Toilet Flushes Out Burglary Suspect - HuffPost

In a mind-boggling world first, a team of biologists and security researchers have successfully infected a computer with a malicious program coded into a strand of DNA.

It sounds like science fiction, but I assure you its quite real although you probably dont have to worry about this particular threat vector any time soon. That said, the possibilities suggested by this project are equally fascinating and terrifying to contemplate.

The multidisciplinary team at the University of Washington isnt out to make outlandish headlines, although its certainly done that. They were concerned that the security infrastructure around DNA transcription and analysis was inadequate, having found elementary vulnerabilities in open-source software used in labs around the world. Given the nature of the data usually being handled, this could be a serious problem going forward.

Sure, they could demonstrate the weakness of the systems with the usual malware and remote access tools. Thats how any competent attacker would come at such a system. But the discriminating security professional prefers to stay ahead of the game.

One of the big things we try to do in the computer security community is to avoid a situation where we say, Oh shoot, adversaries are here and knocking on our door and were not prepared,' said professor Tadayoshi Kohno, who has a history of pursuing unusual attack vectors for embedded and niche electronics like pacemakers.

From left, Lee Organick, Karl Koscher, and Peter Ney from the UWs Molecular Information Systems Lab and the Security and Privacy Research Lab prepare the DNA exploit for sequencing

As these molecular and electronic worlds get closer together, there are potential interactions that we havent really had to contemplate before, added Luis Ceze, one co-author of the study.

Accordingly, they made the leap plenty of sci-fi writers have made in the past, and that we are currently exploring via tools like CRISPR: DNA is basically lifes file system. The analysis programs are reading a DNA strands bases (cytosine, thymine etc, the A, T, G, and C we all know) and turning them into binary data. Suppose those nucleotides were encoding binary data in the first place? After all, its been done before right down the hall.

Heres how they did it. All you really need to know about the transcription application is that it reads the raw data coming from the transcription process and sorts through it, looking for patterns and converting the base sequences it finds into binary code.

The conversion from ASCII As, Ts, Gs, and Cs into a stream of bits is done in a fixed-size buffer that assumes a reasonable maximum read length, explained co-author Karl Koscher in response to my requests for more technical information.

That makes it ripe for a basic buffer overflow attack, in which programs execute arbitrary code because it falls outside expected parameters. (They cheated a little by introducing a particular vulnerability into the software themselves, but they also point out that similar ones are present elsewhere, just not as conveniently for purposes of demonstration.)

After developing a way to include executable code in the base sequence, they set about making the exploit itself. Ironically, its inaccurate to call it a virus, although its closer to a real virus than perhaps any malicious code ever written.

The exploit was 176 bases long, Koscher wrote. The compression program translates each base into two bits, which are packed together, resulting in a 44 byte exploit when translated.

Given that there are 4 bases, it would make sense to have each represent a binary pair. Koscher confirmed this was the case. (If youre curious, as I was: A=00, C=01, G=10, T=11.)

Most of these bytes are used to encode an ASCII shell command, he continued. Four bytes are used to make the conversion function return to the system() function in the C standard library, which executes shell commands, and four more bytes were used to tell system() where the command is in memory.

Essentially the code in the DNA escapes the program as soon as it is converted from ACGTs to 00011011s, and executes some commands in the system a sufficient demonstration of the existence of the threat vector. And theres plenty of room for more code if you wanted to do more than break out of the app.

At 176 bases, the DNA strand comprising the exploit is by almost any biological standard, very small, said Lee Organick, a research scientist who worked on the project.

In pursuance of every science journalists prime directive, which is to take interesting news and turn it into an existential threat to humanity, I had more questions for the team.

CONCEIVABLY, I asked, in all caps to emphasize that we were entering speculative territory, could such a payload be delivered via, for example, a doctored blood sample or even directly from a persons body? One can imagine a person whose DNA is essentially deadly to poorly secured computers.

Irresponsibly, Organick stoked the fires of my fearmongering.

A doctored biological sample could indeed be used as a vector for malicious DNA to get processed downstream after sequencing and be executed, he wrote.

However, getting the malicious DNA strand from a doctored sample into the sequencer is very difficult with many technical challenges, he continued. Even if you were successfully able to get it into the sequencer for sequencing, it might not be in any usable shape (it might be too fragmented to be read usefully, for example).

Its not quite the biopunk apocalypse I envisioned, but the researchers do want people thinking along these lines at least as potential avenues of attack.

We do want scientists thinking about this so they can hold the DNA analysis software they write to the appropriate security standards so that this never makes sense to become a potential attack vector in the first place, said Organick.

I would treat any input as untrusted and potentially able to compromise these applications, added Koscher. It would be wise to run these applications with some sort of isolation (in containers, VMs, etc.) to contain the damage an exploit could do. Many of these applications are also run as publicly-available cloud services, and I would make isolating these instances a high priority.

The likelihood of an attack like this actually being pulled off is minuscule, but its a symbolic milestone in the increasing overlap between the digital and the biological.

The researchers will present their findings and process (PDF) next week at the USENIX Security conference in Vancouver.

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Malicous code written into DNA infects the computer that reads it - TechCrunch

The York Gospels were assembled more than a thousand years ago. Bound in leather, illustrated, and illuminated, the book contains the four gospels of the Bible as well as land records and oaths taken by clergymen who read, rubbed, and kissed its pages over centuries. The Archbishops of York still swear their oaths on this book.

The York Gospels are also, quite literally, a bunch of old cow and sheep skins. Skin has DNA, and DNA has its own story to tell.

A group of archaeologists and geneticists in the United Kingdom have now analyzed the remarkably rich DNA reservoir of the York Gospels. They found DNA from humans who swore oaths on its pages and from bacteria likely originating on the hands and mouths of those humans. Best of all though, they found 1,000-year-old DNA from the cows and sheep whose skin became the parchment on which the book is written.

Remarkably, the authors say they extracted all this DNA without destroying even a tiny piece of parchment. All they needed were the crumbs from rubbing the book with erasers, which conservationists routinely use to clean manuscripts. The authors report their findings in a preprint that has not yet been peer-reviewed, though they plan to submit it to a scientific journal.

If their technique works, it could revolutionize the use of parchment to study history. Every one of these books is a herd of animals. Using DNA, researchers might track how a disease changed the makeup of a herd or how the skin of sheep from one region moved to another medieval trade routes. Its part of a growing movement to bring together scholars in the sciences and humanities to study medieval manuscripts.

Scientists have extracted DNA from parchment before, but this non-destructive technique expands the potential pool of research material. Archivists are loathe to allow researchers to cut off a piece of, say, the York Gospels, but some eraser crumbs? Sure. Thats why its such an exciting breakthrough. It allows a lot of different manuscripts from a lot of different areas to be analyzed together, says Bruce Holsinger, an English professor at the University of Virginia who is writing a book about parchment.

The idea to study parchment came to Matthew Collins, an archaeologist at the University of York, after a failed study in bones. A few years ago, he had a graduate student trying to extract ancient DNA from animal bones at an old Viking settlement. There were thousands of bones on the site, but only six that they tested yielded DNAtoo few for any statistically significant results. You can imagine the frustration, says Collins.

So Collins got to thinking about archives full of old manuscripts. You look at these shelves, and every one of them has a skin of an animal with a date written on it, he says. Suddenly you have thousands of animals. And you didnt even need to go out into the field and dig. When Collins and postdoctoral researcher Sarah Fiddyment first approached archives to collaborate though, they made the mistake of thinking like archaeologists used to routinely pulverizing bone for DNA analysis. They told us we would not be allowed to sample the parchments. Matthew and I didnt think of it, says Fiddyment. She ended up shadowing conservationists for several weeks and learned about their eraser technique. White plastic erasers made by Staedtler turned out to be perfect for cleaning manuscripts and for collecting DNA.

Collins and Fiddyment had previously collaborated with Holsinger to use the eraser technique to study proteins from uterine vellumso named because it is so thin that people thought that they were made from the skin of unborn livestock. Others, however suggested the skin came from different animals entirely, like squirrel or rabbit. The team published a study in 2015 analyzing proteins rubbed off of uterine vellum. They found that uterine vellum is indeed from calves, sheep, and goats, though not necessarily unborn ones.

With the York Gospels, Collins and Fiddyment went one step further to look for DNA with the eraser technique. They analyzed eraser dust from eight pages. Three of the samples yielded enough DNA to compare to modern cattle genomes, and the single most complete parchment genome was similar to modern Norwegian reds and Holsteins.

They also looked at the sex of the calves. Four of the five whose sex they could determine from DNA were female, which they found highly unusual if representative. Females are more valuable if you want to grow your herds, so why would you kill so many females to make parchment? Collins and Fiddyment consulted with Annelise Binois-Roman, a zooarchaeologist, who noted that a cattle plague swept through England in the years before the York Gospels were created. Perhaps those dead calves were salvaged to make parchment. Another colleague who specialized in the Anglo-Saxon era suggested maybe precious female calves were deliberately used because it is such an important book.

The First Book of Selfies

Collins and Fiddyment recognize that scientists alone cant make sense of the DNA from parchment. They need historians and literary scholars and curators to interpret their findings. Since then, Collins has reached out to scholars and archivists far and wide to collect more DNA samples.

Timothy Stinson, an English professor at North Carolina State University, first wrote about studying DNA from parchment seven years ago. I felt like the voice in the wilderness, says Stinson. Thats changed now with the efforts of Collins and others. Stinson is interested in using DNA to study how the production of books changed over time. Early on, he says, manuscripts were likely made up of related animals from the same herd. But as cities like London and Paris grew, guilds sprung up to make books, bringing in parchment from all over.

Collins points out that medievalists studying copying errors in manuscripts have long used the same phylogenetic programs that evolutionary biologists use to study how DNA mutations appear over time. DNA analysis is simply a new way to read the hidden messages in parchment.

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Sampling DNA From a 1000-Year-Old Illuminated Manuscript - The Atlantic

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This undated booking photo provided by the Ventura County Sheriff shows Andrew David Jensen, 42, of Ventura, Calif., who was arrested on July 28, 2017 on suspicion of committing a burglary.(Photo: Ventura County Sheriff via AP)

When you gotta go, you gotta go.

A California man accused of burglary left DNA evidence in the toilet of the home he robbed last October, Associated Press reported Tuesday.

Andrew David Jensen, 42, "did his business and didn't flush it,"Detective Tim Lohman of the Ventura County Sheriffs Office told the Associated Press.

When police initially responded to the break-in last year, they "were able to locate items that potentially contained the suspects DNA," according to a statement from the Ventura County Sheriff's Office. Forensic analysts were then able to match the samples from the scene with DNA already in their system.

Lohman told the Associated Press that this is the first case he knows of where fecal evidence collected from a toilet after a burglary had a successful DNA match.

"When people think of DNA evidence, they usually think of hair samples or saliva," Lohman told the Associated Press.

Jensen was arrested July 28 and remains in pre-trial custody, according to the police statement.

Contributing: Associated Press

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Police: Man left DNA in toilet during burglary - USA TODAY

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How a 'Velcro' chip that traps alien DNA could improve prenatal testing - STAT

Alexa Renee, KXTV 5:43 PM. PDT August 08, 2017

Investigators say Robin Brooks found dead 37 years ago was sexually assaulted prior to being stabbed to death in her apartment. (Photo: Sacramento County Sheriff's Department)

The Sacramento County Sheriff's Department is taking a crack at a cold case using an advanced DNA technology.

On April 24, 1980, Robin Gisela Brooks, was found stabbed to death in the bedroom of her Rosemont apartment. The 20-year-old had been sexually assaulted prior to her death and investigators found DNA evidence of the suspect at the crime scene but have been unable to identify the killer.

Brooks was scheduled to work at Donut Time on Kiefer Boulevard on the day she was found dead, but never show up for her shift. That's when coworkers came looking for Brooks and made the tragic discovery. Brooks family has a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible for her murder.

Her family may get closer to getting answers because of the sheriff's department new efforts in finding the suspect. The department has a full DNA profile of the suspect but no matches have come up on any federal or state DNA database.

Sacramento County investigators are hoping DNAphenotypingcould paint a picture of who killed Brooks. The DNA service cost the department $4,000 and is charged per case, it's not a flat rate fee. It's the first time the sheriff's department has used DNA phenotypingto try and solve a case.

What is DNA phenotyping?

Phenotyping can also help identify relatives of a person through DNA connections.

The testing cannot determine factors such as age, weight and facial hair since those details are not available in a person's genetic code. Parabonpredicts a person at 25-years-old by default. Forensic artists would have to adjust age, facial hair and weight based on description information provided by police or eye witnesses.

DNA phenotyping helps illustrate what a person may look like when there are no leads on identification or when a DNA profile doesn't match anything in a database. The tool is especially helpful in case like the Brooks murder, where there were no eyewitnesses to the crime to describe a suspect, but traces of DNA were left behind.

The technology was created fordefense, security, justice, and intelligence communities and has been used by numerous agencies to help generate leads. Private citizens have used Snapshot to find ancestry information.

Has DNA phenotyping helped solve cases?

Phenotyping can be a great tool for eliminating suspects and sparking leads.

Police had previously believed the suspect was a Latino male because Bouzigard was last seen with a group of Latino men. However, the Parabonanalysis found the suspect to be a white male.

Parabon led the Rockingham County Sheriff's Office to Jose Alvarez Jr., the brother of couple's daughter's boyfriend at the time of the murder. He was arrested in Aug. 2015 and later pled guilty to two both murders. In July of 2016, he was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.

Phenotyping can also help with unidentified remains when there is no visual on what the person may have looked like.

What are the issues with DNAphenotyping?

Phenotypingrelies on identifying using physical appearance, which is a method that can run into some problems. Parabontechnology cannot positively create a photo ID of a person, it can only help create a visual when there are no other leads.

Also, a person can look like a sibling or relative, or even another completely unrelated person. There's no science available that can confirm a person's DNA through face structure.

The only way to identify someone using DNA phenotypingis if a person of interest is tested for DNA and it comes back as a match with the sample used to create the Parabonsketch. This means, there'd have to be a tip leading to that person. Unfortunately, the actual suspect may not look like the sketch and misleading tips may come in.

Another issue the ACLU touches on is social and racial profiling. When a sketch is that of a person of color it can fuel "existing societal prejudices to further increase the risks to innocent people". Also, police officers with less sophisticated science tools may rely too heavily on the images and pressure DNA tests from innocent people.

Phenotypingshould be used as more of a tool to narrow down or eliminate suspects, rather than as a point of probable cause to "create" a suspect.

In cold cases such as the killing of Brooks, phenotypingcan help jog memories of someone who may have seen something or knows anything about the suspect, since there is nothing else to go on to solve the case but the DNA profile of the suspect.

Below are the Snapshot DNA phenotyping results for the suspect in the Brooks case. Note physical appearance of subject may have changed over the years.

Snapshot prediction of suspect in 1980 murder of Rosemont woman, Robin Grisela Brooks. (Photo: Parabons NanoLabs Inc.)

Snapshot prediction of suspect in 1980 murder of Rosemont woman, Robin Grisela Brooks. (Photo: Parabons NanoLabs Inc.)

2017 KXTV-TV

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Sacramento County Sheriff's Department using new DNA technology for cold case - ABC10

New forensic testing suggests two men serving life sentences for a 1994 rape and murder in Chicago were wrongfully convicted because DNA from the victim's underwear is linked to a serial rapist, a petition filed Monday in Cook County court alleges.

The DNA from the underwear matches the serial rapist, who is not named in the filing, with "almost scientific certainty," the filing states. DNA found under the victim's fingernails and on her sweatshirt does not match the men serving time for the crime, but the serial rapist could not be excluded as the source of that DNA, the petition said.

The Cook County state's attorney's office said it is doing an "intense review and investigation" into the case and is awaiting more DNA results.

A jury convicted Nevest Coleman and Darryl Fulton in the April 1994 rape and murder of Antwinica Bridgeman about three years after the crime.

At the time of the slaying, Coleman worked as a respected, well-liked member of the groundskeeping crew at Comiskey Park, court records show. Fulton lived near Coleman in Englewood.

Bridgeman had just celebrated her 20th birthday at a small gathering with friends attended by Coleman. She disappeared that night and was discovered weeks later in Coleman's basement.

Illinois Department of Corrections

Coleman and a friend found Bridgeman's body with a piece of concrete in her mouth and a pipe in her vagina.

Both Coleman, 25, and Fulton, 27, gave police confessions implicating themselves and another man in the crime. The two later said their confessions were coerced, and the third man would not give a statement after denying any involvement. Prosecutors dropped the charges against the third man.

Coleman's attorney Russell Ainsworth, with the Exoneration Project at the University of Chicago Law School, filed a motion Monday to temporarily vacate Coleman's sentence and have him released on bond pending the state's reinvestigation of the case. It also seeks to eventually have Coleman's conviction vacated.

Ainsworth's motion states that the "sole evidence" against Coleman was the confession, and his background did not fit with a rapist and murderer.

Coleman had no criminal history before Bridgeman's killing.

Judge Dennis Porter heard the original case in 1997 and also considered Ainsworth's argument on Monday. He delayed a ruling until Aug. 18 while prosecutors file a written argument against Ainsworth's motion.

Mark Rotert, head of the Cook County State's Attorney's Conviction Integrity Unit, told the judge "we're not there yet" regarding vacating the sentence, and asked for more time.

More DNA testing is being done, and it could take months to sort out, Ainsworth said.

Fulton is represented by Kathleen Zellner, a Downers Grove attorney who has handled numerous wrongful conviction cases.

Nicholas Curran, one of Zellner's associates, attended Monday's hearing and said he is in favor of giving prosecutors more time.

Coleman will be transported from prison to attend the next hearing.

Ainsworth's motion details forensic reports that, he says, clear his client and Fulton.

A forensic report dated May 31 of this year notes Coleman, Fulton, the third man and Bridgeman's boyfriend were all excluded as the source of semen collected from the victim's underwear, the filing alleges.

A July 21 forensic report notes Coleman, Fulton, the third man and Bridgeman's boyfriend were also excluded as the source of semen collected from the victim's sweatshirt, but that stain could not exclude the serial rapist, the filing states.

Coleman also "testified that his confession was the product of coercion and false promises," the filing alleges.

Detectives involved with the case have subsequently seen some of their cases fall apart by DNA testing, the filing said.

The recent DNA testing blows a hole through the government's theory of what happened in this crime, Ainsworth said.

For Coleman and Fulton to have raped and murdered Bridgeman, the filing notes, "the victim would have to had consensual sex with a serial rapist (who was not her boyfriend), sex that left his semen on her underwear and sweatshirt, and then Mr. Coleman, Mr. Fulton and (the third man) subsequently raped the victim without leaving any of their DNA on her underwear, sweatshirt or fingernails."

After the hearing, a spokeswoman for State's Attorney Kim Foxx released a statement saying the case "remains the subject of an intense review and investigation by the Cook County State's Attorney's Office Conviction Integrity Unit."

Prosecutors are awaiting additional DNA results and have asked for an expedited examination from the laboratory. They "will continue to approach the investigation of Mr. Coleman and Mr. Fulton's convictions with urgency, and remain in contact with their counsel as the investigation proceeds," officials said.

Coleman's relatives filled a bench in the courtroom during Monday's hearing. Coleman's brother, Micquel, was in court alongside their sister Jennice. Micquel said he'll host Nevest at his Evanston home if he's freed.

Nevest Coleman has maintained his innocence since day one, his siblings noted. The family became emotional while listing the events he's missed while locked up, including the death of his parents.

"We just want him out," Jennice Coleman said.

Coleman's two children, Chanequa and Nicholas, who are 25 and 23, also came to support their father. The children described Coleman as an attentive dad even behind bars, asking about what's going on in their lives and offering advice.

"I feel like he's here, but he's not," Nicholas Coleman said.

gpratt@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @royalpratt

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DNA in 1994 murder points to serial rapist, not 2 men serving life ... - Chicago Tribune