Category Archives: DNA

BLOOMINGTON The statesapproval to use all of a DNA samplefor testing without prior notice to the defendants lawyer does not preclude the state from using the evidence at his sexual abuse trial, a judge ruled Friday in denying a motion to suppress the state lab results.

Defense lawyer Jennifer Patton argued that Wichmanns constitutional rights were violated because the DNA material is not available for testing by an expert hired by the defense. The material was collected from the inside of a condom, said Patton.

Patton cited an email exchanged between Assistant States Attorney Jacob Harlow and an Illinois State Police forensic scientist in January on the need to use all of the sample for testing.

In his email, Harlow approved of "consumption" of the sample, adding that this case hinges on the DNA findings.

Harlow told Judge Scott Drazewski that state Illinois Supreme Court evidence rules do not require the state to seek the courts permission to consume a DNA sample.

In the Wichmann case, additional DNA material is available from twoother samples and may be tested by the defense, said Harlow.

In his ruling, Drazewski characterized the DNA sample from the inside of the condom asevidence thats going to have much more persuasive information than the remaining samples.

The scientific methods used to locate and examine DNA profiles require a minimum amount of material, noted the judge, and sometimes the samples must be consumed in that process.

The state did not violate the rules of evidence or discovery, said the judge in his denying the the defense motion.

Patton said the defense will move forward with a review of the lab results by an independent expert.

Wichmann will be back in court on Sept. 15.

Follow Edith Brady-Lunny on Twitter: @pg_blunny

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DNA results allowed in sex abuse trial - Bloomington Pantagraph

98% of your DNA is the same as everyone's DNA, 2% is different. (KOKH)

What can you learn from DNA?

Applications for discovering and analyzing the building blocks of life are growing faster than ever and providing new options for everyone from doctors to criminal investigators.

Inside a DNA profile is the recipe for making a person. When it comes to this recipe 98% of it is the same for every human.

Two percent of your DNA is different and that difference, that's the part of the DNA we look at to see what makes you unique and what makes me unique, explained Dr. Patrick Gaffney, the head of the Genomics and Data Sciences Division for the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation.

The differences found inside the two percent of a persons DNA can be compared to the hundreds of thousands of DNA samples that have already been analyzed. Scientists can compare the individual sequences in a DNA profile to those that have similar structures to find features.

We can look at sequences from 500,000 people with blonde hair and blue eyes and say these people seem to have this pattern, Dr. Gaffney told FOX 25, So we can take that information and apply it to another person and say this person is likely to have blonde hair and blue eyes based on their match of our population patterns.

Some companies are taking it further, by analyzing the DNA differences to determine facial features and creating portraits from nothing more than a DNA profile.

What are the applications of this new technology?

Suspects could be pictured when there are no eye witnesses. Law enforcement could give faces for the public to identify when there are only remains found.

Perhaps the most notable case where this technology could be applied would be providing a face to the yet unknown 169th person who died in the Oklahoma City Bombing on April 19, 1995.

The unknown DNA profile sample sat hidden for more than 20 years until revealed by a Washington Times/Fox 25 Investigation. The person is either another victim or another accomplice to the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building.

While the technology was not available in the 1990's, the Oklahoma Medical Examiner held onto the profile that did not match any of the known victims and kept a sample from the unidentified leg left from the bomb site.

At the very least, an analysis now of the DNA profile could tell us traits such as ethnicity, hair color, or eye color.

Even then the composite information that comes from these variants work, like reconstructing facial features...it's an inexact science at this time, Dr. Gaffney said.

Forensic examiners also warn that a composite sketch from DNA also doesn't take into account cosmetic changes which would keep people from identifying a person.

Still Gaffney says as more work is done with DNA, scientists are able to make more accurate predictions based on population studies. This kind of analysis could also lead to precision medicines and treatments in addition to aiding in forensics.

You're going to start seeing improvements in the accuracy of these technologies, Gaffney said.

Read the rest here:
DNA breakthroughs could provide faces to faceless - KOKH FOX25

A record for publication, he said in an interview.

With the new research, he and other scientists have begun to wonder if it may be possible one day to do something even stranger: to program bacteria to snuggle up to cells in the human body and to record what they are doing, in essence making a movie of each cells life.

When something goes wrong, when a person gets ill, doctors might extract the bacteria and play back the record. It would be, said Dr. Church, analogous to the black boxes carried by airplanes whose data is used in the event of a crash.

At the moment, all that is the other side of science fiction, said Ewan Birney, director of the European Bioinformatics Institute and a member of the group that put Shakespeares sonnets in DNA. Storing information in DNA is this side of science fiction.

Dr. Church and Seth Shipman, a geneticist, and their colleagues began by assigning each pixel in the black-and-white film a DNA code based on its shade of gray. The vast chains of DNA in each cell are made of just four molecules adenine, guanine, thymine and cytosine arranged in enormously varied configurations.

The geneticists ended up with a sequence of DNA molecules that represented the entirety of the film. Then they used a powerful new gene editing technique, Crispr, to slip this sequence into the genome of a common gut bacteria, E. coli.

Despite the modification, the bacteria thrived and multiplied. The film stored in the genome was preserved intact with each new generation of progeny, the team found.

Andrew Odlyzko, a mathematics professor and expert on digital technology at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the new research, called it fascinating.

Imagine, he said, the impossibility of controlling secrets, when those secrets are encoded in the genomes of the bacteria in our guts or on our skins.

The renowned physicist Richard Feynman proposed half a century ago that DNA could be used for storage in this way. That was long before the molecular biology revolution, and decades before anyone could sequence DNA much less edit it.

Biology is not simply writing information; it is doing something about it, Dr. Feynman said in a 1959 lecture.

Consider the possibility that we too can make a thing very small which does what we want!

Dr. Feynmans idea was a seminal piece it gave us a direction, said Leonard Adleman, a mathematician at the University of Southern California and co-inventor of one of the most used public cryptography systems, RSA (the A is for Adleman).

In 1994, Dr. Adleman reported that he had stored data in DNA and used it as a computer to solve a math problem. He determined that DNA can store a million million times more data than a compact disc in the same space.

And data storage is a growing problem. Not only are significant amounts being generated, but the technology used to store it keeps becoming obsolete, like floppy disks.

DNA is never going out of fashion. Organisms have been storing information in DNA for billions of years, and it is still readable, Dr. Adleman said. He noted that modern bacteria can read genes recovered from insects trapped in amber for millions of years.

For Dr. Shipman and Dr. Church, the immediate challenge is the brain. It contains 86 billion neurons, and theres no easy way to know what theyre doing.

Right now, we can measure one neuron at a time with electrodes, but 86 billion electrodes would not fit in your brain, Dr. Church said. But gene-edited bacteria would fit very nicely.

The idea is to have bacteria engineered as recording devices drift up to the brain in the blood and take notes for a while. Scientists would then extract the bacteria and examine their DNA to see what they had observed in the brain neurons.

Dr. Church and his colleagues have already shown in past research that bacteria can record DNA in cells, if the DNA is properly tagged.

Peoples intuition is tremendously poor about just how small DNA molecules are and how much information can be packed into them, Dr. Birney said.

And while these are futuristic ideas, biotechnologies have been arriving much faster than anyone predicted, Dr. Church said.

He gave as an example the sequencing of the human genome. The first effort took years and cost $3 billion. The wildest optimists predicted that maybe in six decades each sequencing would cost $1,000.

It turned out it was six years, rather than six decades, Dr. Church said.

A version of this article appears in print on July 13, 2017, on Page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: A Living Hard Drive That Can Copy Itself.

Read the rest here:
Who Needs Hard Drives? Scientists Store Film Clip in DNA - New York Times

(KOKH)

It was DNA that helped seal the fate of Daniel Holtzclaw. From jury members who have spoken about the case publicly to members of the public who followed the trial, the DNA evidence presented in court was damning to the defense.

Prosecutors presented a case that was largely circumstantial evidence, but a police crime lab analyst provided the testimony that told how DNA from one of the victims was found on the inside of the zipper on Holtzclaws uniform pants.

After the conviction, a biologist from Iowa read about the case online. It was not hard to find headlines of the former cop sentenced to 263 years in prison for raping and sexually assaulting a number of women while on patrol.

However, what drew Erica Fuchs to the case was the mention of DNA. Fuchs deals with DNA and has been a lab researcher and was surprised when she could not find out more about this crucial piece of evidence.

She contacted the Holtzclaw family to see if she could review a copy of the laboratory reports.

Right away I could see that both samples had a Y chromosome in them, Fuchs told FOX 25, So this told me that there was DNA from at least one male in both of the samples.

The police analyst told the jury that Holtzclaw's DNA was not found, which prosecutors said helped prove sexual assault. However Fuchs says even that conclusion was not scientifically sound because the DNA samples found were so small. Besides, it wasnt just the male DNA that wasnt identified. There were other profiles that contributed to the sample, but the jury was only told about one.

Those two samples during the analyst's testimony she said had no evidence of male DNA in them, but actually both of those samples did, Fuchs said.

The presence of male DNA could mean a number of things. It could mean that there as a male victim sexually assaulted, but never identified.

However Fuchs says due to the miniscule amount of DNA found in total, the unknown samples adds to the argument made by the defense that the DNA was there due to innocent transfer. DNA, Fuchs said, can be transferred from person to person or from person to object to another person. Defense attorneys during Holtzclaws trial argued that since he had searched the victims belongings he could have picked up a skin cell and then touched his pants.

There is also another possibility.

The sex crimes detectives were handling items in ways that could have led to DNA transferring to the fly of the pants, Fuchs said. She noted in particular an interrogation video showed a detective opening the evidence bag in which Holtzclaws uniform was placed, with his bare hands.

Fuchs is also concerned about the lack of testing performed by the Oklahoma City Police crime lab. While tests for bodily fluids and even vaginal fluids are available, they were not performed in a case that alleged sexual assault. Despite that fact prosecutors told jurors that the victims DNA found on Holtzclaws pants came from vaginal walls. Fuchs says it is scientifically impossible to identify where the DNA originated.

During the secret court hearings that have become the latest controversy to surround this high-profile case, FOX 25 has learned DNA was part of the discussion.

The court ordered the hearings sealed. Attorneys representing Holtzclaw on his appeal were not even allowed to attend. However, one person FOX 25 has confirmed was in attendance was the supervisor of the police DNA lab. He was there for both days of the hearing that only involved prosecutors and a judge.

While no one is talking on the record about what happened during that hearing, the appeals court ordered it just days after receiving a request from several DNA experts, including Fuchs, to provide the court with information about scientific flaws presented at trial.

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Male DNA identified but not disclosed during ex-cop's controversial trial - KOKH FOX25

Your DNA can determine things like whether mosquitoes like to bite you, if you have migraines, and if your more likely to own a dog!

WBIR 1:43 PM. EDT July 13, 2017

Syringe and petri dish with letters DNA (Photo: Creatas Images)

Millions of Americans are fascinated with their heritage---- digging into their family treeto find out about their ancestors. The newest trend in finding out where we came from is genetics, a scientific process being brought to the masses by websites like Ancestry.com and 23andme.com.

DNA genetic testing can show what part of the world your ancestors came from, identify possible health issues that run in your family, and even help you find long-lost relatives.

Genetics also determine things like your eye color, if your hair is curly or straight, orwhether you have a widow's peak or dimples.

WBIR's Robin Wilhoitwill delve more deeply into DNA testing on 10News at 6 on Monday and Tuesday, as she follows an adopted East Tennessee woman's quest to learn more about her biological family.

Until then, here are a few fun facts about what DNA can reveal about you, courtesy of 23andMe.com.

GENETICS DETERMINE YOUR SUSCEPTIBILITY TO MOSQUITOS

There are 15 genetic variants associated with your attractiveness to mosquitos, the size of welts, and the intensity of the itch.

MORNING PEOPLE TEND TO WEIGH LESS

Genetic researchers found that people who identify as morning people were less likely to be obese as well as less likely to be underweight.

YOUR DNA PLAYS A ROLE YOUR MIGRAINES.

44 genetic variants are associated with migraines, pointing to vascular dysfunction as one of the bioligial underpinnings for the disease.

MOTION SICKNESS IS VERY HERITABLE

Genetics accounts for a large reason why some of us, one in every three people, are more prone to motion sickness than others

LOVE THE TASTE OF CILANTRO?

To some people, cilantro tastes soapy, and genetics are to blame. Scientists discovered a genetic variant near the gene OR6A2 associated with thinking cilantro tasted like soap.

AUDIBLE EATING BAD MANNERS OR GENETICS?

About 25 percent of women and 19 percent of menp.

reported being "filled with rage" by the sound of others eating, a genetic trait called misophonia.

BATTLE OF THE SIBLINGS

Genetics have revealed that first-born children start to read earlier, take more advanced math classes, an tend to be more outspoken.

Second-born children are more altruistic, less tense, and tend to own a dog.

2017 WBIR.COM

Continued here:
Mosquitos love you? Hate cilantro? Own a dog? Your DNA may tell you why - WBIR-TV

By JoNel Aleccia July 12, 2017

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Contamination at a German factory that makes crucial machines used during open-heart surgery is the likely source of a global outbreak of deadly infections tied to the devices, the largest analysis to date shows.

Scientists using whole-genome sequencing matched the DNA fingerprints of samples taken from infected heart-surgery patients from several countries, including the U.S., to samples from the devices, called heater-cooler units, in multiple hospitals and at the production site.

The study, published Wednesday in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal, concludes that heater-cooler devices made at the LivaNova PLC plant in Munich, Germany, were contaminated during production.

The analysis provides a critical piece of the puzzle behind more than 100 severe and sometimes fatal infections in cardiac surgery patients worldwide since 2013, researchers said.

Our study closes the missing gap, said Stefan Niemann, a professor with the German Center for Infection Research and one of the studys co-authors.

However, officials with LivaNova said that the study was too limited to draw conclusions.

LivaNova is concerned that the article expresses a level of certainty about a point source tie to the manufacturing process that is not warranted by the data, spokeswoman Deanna Wilke wrote in an email.

Scientists from Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland analyzed 250 DNA samples of Mycobacterium chimaera, an organism typically found in soil and tap water.

The review included samples from 21 infected patients in Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, and data from another 12 in the U.S. and Australia. The analysis included samples from heater-cooler devices by LivaNova and a second German brand, Maquet, plus hospital water sources and environmental sources.

Scientists found a high degree of similarity in samples from the patients and from the LivaNova heater-cooler units and the LivaNova factory.

The authors noted that they were not able to link individual patients to particular heater-cooler units because they lacked enough water and air samples to document transmission. Infections have been linked to contaminated water in the devices that is then misted into the air.

They also warned against ending investigations into the problem too soon. Researchers found that some hospital water systems and Maquet heater-coolers were contaminated, raising concerns about local contamination.

Vincent Karst, 55, of York, Pa., was among those infected with Mycobacterium chimaera. Known as Vinnie, the father of five and grandfather to 15 appeared to do well after open-heart surgery in March 2015. But, according to a lawsuit, he fell mysteriously ill and had to be re-hospitalized with what doctors later said was an infection tied to the heater-cooler unit used during his operation.

Karst died in May from complications of the infection, his lawyer said.

Patients in several other states have filed lawsuits claiming they were infected, too.

Karsts surgery used a Sorin 3T heater-cooler, a device that circulates water to warm or cool patients blood during bypass operations. More than 250,000 operations using the devices are performed each year in the U.S., and about 60 percent are done with the Sorin 3T models approved for sale in 2006. After a 2015 merger, Sorin became LivaNova.

At least five other manufacturers also sell heater-coolers in the U.S. and they all share a design that could pose a risk for infections, experts say.

The heater-cooler devices use fans to regulate airflow. If the water in the system is contaminated with bacteria, the machines can send the germs into the air, where they can settle in open surgical sites or on cardiac implants before insertion. One complicating factor is that it can take months or even years to detect the slow-growing infections.

Early reports of infections tied to heater-cooler units date to 2002, and Food and Drug Administration officials have said they were aware of the problem by 2014. At least 15 people in the U.S. have died, according to reports submitted to the agency.

But the FDA waited more than a year to warn the public about the risk and even longer to provide recommendations for action to hospitals and patients. Critics contend that if the agency had intervened earlier, more patients would have avoided infections, even death.

The agency now warns that for 3T devices manufactured before September 2014, there is strong evidence of common contamination at the manufacturing site in Germany. But spokeswoman Stephanie Caccomo said local contamination can also occur and hospitals should perform appropriate follow-up measures.

Lawrence Muscarella, a Pennsylvania patient-safety consultant, said hes concerned that a focus on contamination at the factory might lead hospitals to relax their vigilance about what are often called Nontuberculous mycobacteria, or NTM, infections.

[They] might incorrectly conclude that whats to blame for these infections is contamination at a companys manufacturing plant, something the hospital can do nothing about, rather than understanding that hospitals can reduce the risk of NTM infections in open-chest patients, he said.

At the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, where six patients developed infections tied to heater-cooler units, experts solved the problem by putting the devices in a room connected to but separate from the operating room, said Dr. Michael Edmond.

I dont think we can safely say the machines can be decontaminated, said Edmond, a clinical professor of infectious diseases. The only safe mitigation strategy is you have to separate the air that comes out of that machine from the air in the operating room.

Since the hospital took that action in January 2016, no new infections have been detected.

It works beautifully, Edmond said.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

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DNA Links Deadly Germs, Tainted Heart Surgery Devices To ... - Kaiser Health News

from an Idaho Falls Police Dept. news release

Idaho Falls Police Department recently received a DNA report that clears Michael Usry Jr. and his family of involvement in the Angie Dodge homicide case. The testing clears the Usry family out to the 6th-degree relative.

In 2014, in an effort to find a DNA match to the killer involved in the Angie Dodge case, police searched the public DNA database, Ancestry.com. Using the Y strand only from DNA found at the murder scene, the report showed 34 out of 35 markers of the Usry family.

The department then took the DNA testing to the next level. Snapshot DNA Phenotyping Kinship testing from the Parabon Nanolabs was completed. The test not only evaluated the Y strand, but the familial DNA of both the male side and female side, overlaying them to come up with a profile. The report stated that they were 87.63 percent confident that the unknown DNA from the Angie Dodge crime scene did not match the Usry family.

Parabon testing is the same testing the Idaho Falls Police Department used to get the DNA Phenotype snapshot of the suspected killer released in a press conference on May 1, 2017.

We have talked to both Mike Usry Jr. and Carol Dodge personally to let them know of the test results, states Det. Pat McKenna, Idaho Falls Police Department. We are continuing to work the leads received from the snapshot and continuing with our investigation as we have been. These results do not change that, adds McKenna.

View original post here:
DNA Clears Family Over Angie Dodge Case | News | kpvi.com - KPVI News 6

Inside the Crime Lab facility opened in 2015.

A crime lab tech demonstratesDNA evidence processing.

The wait time for results on DNA testing was recently calculated by the lab to be 211 days. The response on rush cases for DNA evidence is at the level most jurisdictions consider acceptable: 30 days or less.

Slow turnaround times for processing requests for an increased number of latent fingerprints also have dogged the facility. From January through June 2017 the crime lab reported aturnaround time of 197 days. Response time for trace evidence assignments was 168 days.

The lab's newly released quarterly report showsturnaround times for toxicology and drug testingare in line with best practices for evidence processing. Ballistics and tool mark tests were waiting for over 90 days.

We've been fairly stable compared to where we were last year regarding most of our examination type, Zilley said.

In the first half of 2017 the lab processed 2,626 pieces of evidence. If the workload maintains that pace,the lab will match the record number of assignments handled the previous year, 5,500 individual pieces of evidence.

Delays in DNA and fingerprint evidence concern both prosecutors and attorneys representing those accused of crimes.

On the most basic level the turnaround time for DNA evidence is an access to justice issue, said Tricia Bushnell, the director of the Midwest Innocence Project, an organization dedicated to identifying cases where individuals have been wrongly convicted of crimes.

This whole hurry up and wait component really adds a lot of stress to both defendants and victims, Bushnell said. When we think about something that can give a victim definitive knowledge, DNA can do that.

Last year scientific analysis of crime scene evidence at the Lincoln-based labwasconducted on behalf of 156 law enforcement agencies.

The state opened the new $9 million crime lab headquarters near the Lincoln airport in October of 2015. It was hoped it would help address persistent delays in getting test results to police agencies.

When the building was unveiled to the states news media, Governor Pete Ricketts said it would allow staff to be more efficient in helping out those agencies. Ricketts stated the improved technology and additional space for lab workers would help law enforcement do a better job of catching the bad guys and putting them away.

Bradley Rice, the recently ousted superintendent of the state patrol accompanied the governor and said he was very hopeful backlogs of evidence waiting to be processed could be reduced across the board to only about a month.

In some categories that promise has been met.

The new facility has been tremendous, Zilley told NET News, crediting additions to equipment and staff as well as a more efficient layout with keeping goals in some areas on target. Currently the lab maintains a staff of 26 technicians and support staff.

Those people have worked so hard and put in quite a bit of overtime, in order to get their turnaround time down, Zilley said. Approximately 30 days is something that we have found submitting agencies are happy with, the courts are happy with.

It has been a tremendous relief for all of us to be able to get that turnaround time down, she added.

Whats not going according to plan is the sheer volume of requests for evidence processing from police agencies all over the state. Since the new facility opened, work load has jumped 16 percent overall and submissions to the biology section have shown an unprecedented increase, especially the jump in requests for DNA processing.

Twenty percent is a lot, Zilley said. Clearly, that's a large caseload. There's a lot of pressure to try to get it done.

The biology section provides DNA testing for nearly all of the law enforcement agencies in Nebraska, and is considered a vital part of investigations of violent crimes, including murder and sexual assault.

Demand for DNA testing outstrips increases in violent crime rates reported in Nebraska, meaning something other than more crime is driving the increased demand.

Zilley declined to speculate on what is behind the increase.

We don't have really any control over what comes to us. We don't necessarily know why it's suddenly coming to us, she said, noting DNA testing over the last number of years has trended up in Nebraska, reflecting national trends.

The National Institute of Justice reports the demand for DNA testing is rising because more biological samples are collected at crime scenes and state laws created DNA data bases of samples drawn from convicted felons and sex offenders.

Improved training and awareness have permitted smaller agencies to collect and preserve usable DNA evidence. County attorneys are more likely to expect biological evidence as a routine part of their prosecutions.

Filling the allotted number of lab technician jobs has helped other sections of the crime lab to meet turnaround time goals.

Controlled substances (drug testing) is doing great, Zilley said. Their turnaround time now is about 30 days. We added an additional person to that section last year. He's completed his training, so now we are full staff. Everybody trained, everybody working cases.

Filling a position in the section testing firearms and tool marks helped meet the demand for ballistics testing. Theres hope filling a slot in the latent fingerprint section will get similar results.

When the new crime lab was unveiled to the public Governor Ricketts was asked if he would add additional technicians to help reduce the backlog. He said hed evaluate staffing after seeing how the improved facility improved the work flow.

Zilley responded cautiously when asked about requesting funds for new lab technicians to meet the increased demand for their services.

More people would be great but, of course, we're a state agency and lots of state agencies need people, and the state patrol needs people, Zilley said. There's only so many resources to go around.

Any decisions about staffing will wait for a new state patrol superintendent on the heels of the old boss being fired by the governor.

Both prosecutors and defense attorneys would like to see the state patrol reduce the wait time for DNA results.

Nobody likes the idea that there is truth there to be found, but we dont have the resources to get to it, said Bushnell of the Innocence Project, noting its a problem facing crime labs nationwide.

I dont think anyone thinks its going to be instantaneous, but people definitely want to have things worked when they come in, but the reality is there is such a backlog in so many states because its a resource issue. Labs dont have enough personnel to handle the amount of DNA work that is coming it.

Lab Director Zilley says she and her staff want to cut that turn-around time significantly.

We do everything we can to try to make the most of what we have.

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Delays for DNA, fingerprint results continue to vex Nebraska State Patrol Crime lab. - NET Website

None of Charles Churchs DNA was found on the body of the child who testified Tuesday that he sexually assaulted her in November 2015, according to forensic experts who testified on Wednesday during day two of the trial for the former Richmond police officer. But his DNA was found in the Barbie-printed underwear found in a pile of Churchs clothes.

Forensic experts provided most of the testimony during the second day of what is expected to be a three-day trial.

The prosecution rested its case on Wednesday, and the public defenders representing Church began presenting their theory that the child made up her story about sexual assault.

Church, 41, of the 1400 block of West Marshall Street, is charged with two counts of sodomy, two counts of object sexual penetration and indecent liberties with a child younger than 13.

The underwear, which a detective held up for a jury to show it was very small, was stained with blood.

Lori Seman, a DNA expert at the Virginia Department of Forensic Science, testified that she found two distinct contributors of DNA, and a third sample that was deemed an anomaly from testing.

The two DNA profiles matched the childs and Churchs.

Lisa Schiermeier-Wood, who uses a computer program to calculate the statistical likelihood of DNA matches at the Virginia Department of Forensic Science, testified that the likelihood of the DNA matching any other random humans other than the child or Church as in the billions and trillions.

The defense team is planning to call an expert witness during the final day of testimony who could shed more light on the third unknown sample found in the underwear.

DNA experts also affirmed the defenses questions that the trace amounts of Churchs DNA could have been transferred onto the panties from the clothes it was found among.

On Tuesday, the child who alleges the sexual assault testified.

At times, she struggled to describe what happened to her. Deputy Commonwealths Attorney Kelli Burnett said she described (the alleged assault) in her own developmentally appropriate way.

Curtis Mullis, an investigator working for the Richmond Public Defenders office, which represents Church, searched the childs phone records and discovered that she had searched the internet for the term how to get pregnant and had an email confirming a subscription from a pornography website with live videos of simulated sex.

Burnett tried to deflect the evidence, saying anyone with access to the girls phone could have accessed the websites.

The trial continues Thursday, when a jury of nine men and five women including two alternates will be expected to deliver its verdict after all the evidence is presented.

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Former RPD officer's DNA found on child's clothing, but not on body - Richmond.com

July 12, 2017 Gold nanorods coated with dsDNA act like an OR logic gate in the presence of estrogen receptor proteins ER and ER. Credit: A*STAR Institute of Materials Research and Engineering

By adding strands of DNA to a solution containing gold nanorods, A*STAR researchers have created a remarkably simple system that can 'compute' basic logic operations like OR and NOT in response to specific molecular inputs. This has potential applications in rapid and complex diagnostic systems.

Clinical diagnostics often rely on the detection of pathogens and disease biomarkers from samples of blood or other biological fluids from patients. Most such tests produce a simple 'true' or 'false' result for the presence of a single biomarker. The ability to perform logic operations such as AND and OR for two or more biomarkers could greatly increase the diagnostic power of such tests. Progress in building biomolecular logic gates is hampered by the complex and chemically demanding modifications required to produce practical logic systems.

Xiao Di Su and colleagues from the A*STAR Institute of Materials Research and Engineering and University College London have devised a highly versatile and reliable diagnostic system using gold nanorods, DNA and proteins, that is both easy to create and offers the potential for sophisticated logic-based computing operations.

"We have taken human gene regulation, one of the most precise mechanisms in nature, and applied it to develop the basis of a new technology in the field of biocomputing," says Su.

Gold nanorods absorb light at specific wavelengths determined by the rods' dimensions, but the degree of absorption is controlled by the aggregation of the nanorods in solution. Su and her colleagues found that when double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) was added to the nanorod solution, the aggregation of the nanorods could be reliably controlled by the dsDNA concentration.

To demonstrate the system, the researchers created the solution using DNA segments containing the DNA sequence for estrogen receptor (ER) elements, which would allow the system to respond to the addition of ER proteins. They found that the system could be configured to give an OR result a change from a 'low' to 'high' absorbance level when one or both of the two different ER variants (ER and ER) were added to the solution as well as a NOT result in response to dsDNA addition. The team then demonstrated other logic functions (IMPLY, FALSE, TRUE and BUFFER), which when arranged in series formed the basis for more complex logic operations.

"This is a simple, yet highly versatile platform that does not rely on nanomaterial functionalization or other complicated fabrication methods, and demonstrates the huge potential of nature-inspired applications using biological binding events to manipulate the optical properties of nanomaterials," says Su.

Explore further: New technique controls dimensions of gold nanorods while manufacturing on a large scale

More information: Roger M. Pallares et al. A plasmonic multi-logic gate platform based on sequence-specific binding of estrogen receptors and gold nanorods, Nanoscale (2016). DOI: 10.1039/c6nr07569j

North Carolina State University researchers have a developed a technique for efficiently producing nanoscale gold rods in large quantities while simultaneously controlling the dimensions of the nanorods and their optical ...

Mineko Kengaku, Tatsuya Murakami, and their colleagues from Kyoto University's Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS) have developed a new method that modifies the surface of nanorods, making them more efficient ...

Mercury is harmful even in small amounts. Detecting it currently requires expensive equipment. Researchers are working on a faster and cheaper alternative: a portable sensor that can perform a rapid analysis in the field. ...

Researchers have fine-tuned a technique for coating gold nanorods with silica shells, allowing engineers to create large quantities of the nanorods and giving them more control over the thickness of the shell. Gold nanorods ...

A North Carolina State University chemist has found a way to give DNA-based computing better control over logic operations. His work could lead to interfacing DNA-based computing with traditional silicon-based computing.

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a simple, scalable way to align gold nanorods, particles with optical properties that could be used for emerging biomedical imaging technologies.

Early phase Northwestern Medicine research has demonstrated a potential new therapeutic strategy for treating deadly glioblastoma brain tumors.

To enhance the visibility of organs as they are scanned with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), patients are usually injected with a compound known as a contrast agent before going into the scanner. The most commonly used ...

From checkout counters at supermarkets to light shows at concerts, lasers are everywhere, and they're a much more efficient light source than incandescent bulbs. But they're not cheap to produce.

A world-first non-destructive quality control method from the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) has enabled Oxford Instruments to commercialise wafer-scale fabrication technology for 2-D material MoS2.

Although scientists have for decades been able to synthesize nanoparticles in the lab, the process is mostly trial and error, and how the formation actually takes place is obscure. However, a study recently published in Nature ...

In today's increasingly powerful electronics, tiny materials are a must as manufacturers seek to increase performance without adding bulk.

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Excerpt from:
Solution of DNA and gold nanorods capable of six fundamental logic operations - Phys.Org