Category Archives: DNA

Launched in 1990, a major goal of the Human Genome Project was to sequence the human genome as fully as possible. In 2003, project scientists unveiled a genome sequence that accounted for over 90% of the human genome as complete as possible for the technology of the time. Darryl Leja, NHGRI/Flickr hide caption

Launched in 1990, a major goal of the Human Genome Project was to sequence the human genome as fully as possible. In 2003, project scientists unveiled a genome sequence that accounted for over 90% of the human genome as complete as possible for the technology of the time.

The Human Genome Project was a massive undertaking that took more than a decade and billions of dollars to complete. For it, scientists collected DNA samples from anonymous volunteers who were told the final project would be a mosaic of DNA. Instead, over two-thirds of the DNA comes from one person: RP11. No one ever told him. Science journalist Ashley Smart talks to host Emily Kwong about his recent investigation into the decision to make RP11 the major donor and why unearthing this history matters to genetics today.

Read Ashley's full article in Undark Magazine here.

Curious about other biology stories? Email us at shortwave@npr.org.

Listen to Short Wave on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.

Today's episode was produced by Berly McCoy and edited by Rebecca Ramirez. They both checked the facts. Kwesi Lee was the audio engineer.

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The dubious consent question at the heart of the Human Genome Project : Short Wave - NPR

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By Shea Carlberg - July 18, 2024 Daily Stories | Homicides | Shooting | Suspects | Victims |

A homicide defendant waived his right to independent testing of DNA evidence recovered from a crime scene, before DC Superior Court Judge Maribeth Raffinan on July 17.

Franklin Dorn, 44, is charged with second-degree murder while armed, possession of a firearm during a crime of violence, and unlawful possession of a firearm by a convict, for his alleged involvement in the shooting of 28-year-old Antonio Brown. The incident occurred on Aug. 6, 2023, on the 1200 block of North Capitol Street, NW.

At the hearing, the prosecution went over the physical evidence that was recovered from the scene and had tested, including a firearm, a magazine for the firearm, a bloodstained shirt allegedly worn during the incident and clothes recovered from Brown during the autopsy.

Parties are scheduled to reconvene Jan. 9.

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Homicide Defendant Waives Right to Independent Testing of DNA Evidence - DC Witness

Allison Brocato last saw her sister alive on the afternoon of January 13, 1995. It was a Friday, and Catherine Edwards, Allisons 31-year-old identical twin, had just gotten off work at Price Elementary School, in Beaumont. On her way home, Edwards stopped to pick up her beagle, whom Brocato had been dogsitting. She lingered a few minutes to chat and to play with Brocatos infant daughter. She seemed kind of sad that day, Brocato would later recall. I think she had had a fight with an ex-boyfriend the night before.

Brocato and Edwards considered themselves best friends. After graduating from Lamar University, they both got jobs as public school teachers and moved into a modest town house in west Beaumont, where they lived together until Brocato got married. The sisters looked so alikea bit shy of five feet tall, slim, with pale skin and shy smilesthat their high school yearbook had mixed up their photos. Later, as teachers, they would occasionally fool their students by pretending to be each other.

The two women spoke again by phone that evening, as they usually did before bed. Edwards had decided to break off all contact with her ex-boyfriend. The sisters both planned to be at the familys traditional Saturday lunch the next day at their parents house, but Edwards never showed up. When her parents drove to her town house to check on her, they found their daughters body in the second-floor bathroom, slumped over the tub. She was nude from the waist down, and her wrists were handcuffed behind her back. Her father sounded frantic when he told Brocato what theyd found. He said, Your sisters dead, your sisters dead.

The brutal murder made front-page news for days in Beaumont, where Edwards was known as a dedicated teacher and a lifelong Presbyterian. She volunteered at St. Elizabeth hospital and served as a mentor for the I Have a Dream Program scholarship. Neighbors remembered her walking her dog each evening. She was loved by everybody, recalled Steve Thrower, a now retired investigator for the Jefferson County District Attorneys Office who was assigned to assist Beaumont Police Department detectives with the case. Great family. Never had any kind of criminal issue. Usually that really shrinks your suspect pool.

Crime scene investigators saw no signs of forced entry at the town house. Either Edwards had left her door unlocked or she had let her killer in. During the autopsy, a forensic pathologist took a vaginal swab that collected semen, which was also found on the comforter of her bed. The assailant appeared to have raped Edwards and drowned her in the bathtub. Detectives collected DNA samples from dozens of potential suspects, including Edwardss ex-boyfriend and several of her colleagues at Price Elementary. None matched the perpetrators DNA. Nor did the DNA match anyone in the Federal Bureau of Investigations recently created Combined DNA Index System, a national database of genetic profiles from convicted criminals, forensic evidence, and missing persons.

As the investigation dragged on month after month without any progress, the case slowly went cold. No arrest was made. For the next quarter century, the semen collected from the Edwards murder sat in a series of evidence-room freezers. Encoded in its DNA was the identity of the killer. But unless he left behind evidence at another crime scene, it seemed unlikely he would ever be caught.

Then, in 2020, a Texas scientist and entrepreneur named David Mittelman approached Beaumont police with an intriguing offer. Two years before, Mittelman had opened a private DNA lab in The Woodlands, an affluent master-planned community north of Houston. He named the company Othram, after the defensive wall of a fortress in J.R.R. Tolkiens The Lord of the Rings. (We serve a public-safety function, so theres a bit of a loose connection there, Mittelman explained.) The lab specializes in forensic genetic genealogy, a powerful new investigative method that combines whole-genome DNA sequencing with traditional genealogical research based on archival documents such as birth and death records. The technique first came to widespread public attention in 2018, when California detectives used it to identify Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. as the Golden State Killer, a serial murderer and rapist who had eluded police for decades.

When Beaumont detective Aaron Lewallen received Mittelmans offer to assist with any unsolved crimes, he immediately thought of the Catherine Edwards murder. This was Beaumonts most high-profile homicide, recalled Lewallen, a laconic 26-year veteran who had developed a specialty in cold cases. With the original detectives ruling out so many of the people who were close to her in her life, it had really become a whodunit. At Lewallens request, local officials agreed to pay Othram about $10,000 to conduct new DNA testing. A few weeks later, a FedEx courier dropped off a Styrofoam box at the labs headquarters. Inside, chilled by an ice pack, was a piece of floral-print fabric from Edwardss comforter and a vaginal swab from the posthumous rape kit.

Unless he was dead or in jail, the man who killed Edwards remained at large. Perhaps he was still in Beaumont. Perhaps he had moved away and started a new life. He had concealed his crime for nearly three decades; surely, he must have thought, the police had given up on the case. There was no way for him to know that in the early 2020s, a small group of detectives and scientists had dedicated themselves to unmasking him.

On a cool gray morning last fall, I drove thirty miles north from Houston to tour Othrams lab. The company rents space in a four-story building beside a lake in a heavily wooded office park off the aptly named Technology Forest Boulevard. David Mittelman greeted me in the elegantly furnished lobby. Wearing jeans and a rumpled black polo shirt, with disheveled hair and beard stubble, the 43-year-old scientist looked like he had been up all night. He was joined by his 45-year-old wife, Kristen, Othrams chief development officer. A lean, angular brunette who has moonlighted as a competitive bodybuilder, she was dressed in stylish athleisure wear. The couple met at Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston, where they both earned doctoratesDavid in molecular biophysics and Kristen in biochemistry.

Together the two have turned Othram into arguably the worlds leading forensic genetic genealogy lab. Over the past six years, the company has been publicly credited with helping to solve nearly 350 cases, including murders, rapes, and unidentified bodies. That number represents only a fraction of the thousands of cases it has actually assisted on, David told me, because some law enforcement officials prefer not to disclose Othrams role in their investigations. (For comparison, Virginia-based Parabon NanoLabs, another well-known company in the field, says it has assisted in more than 315 cases.) Othram has ongoing relationships with agencies around the world, including the Australian Federal Police, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and the Texas Rangers.

Kristen led me through two sets of key cardoperated double doors and down a long corridor lined with floor-to-ceiling glass walls. On the left was a series of research labs, where Othram scientists were exploring new ways to extract and analyze DNA. On the right were the forensic labs, where masked technicians in paper gowns and hairnets bent over hooded lab benches, working on crime scene evidence. In one room, a femur, stained dark from many decades underground, sat on a sheet of butcher paper. Because of privacy concerns, the Mittelmans couldnt reveal anything about the case other than that the bone belonged to a child.

Multiple times a day, packages containing crime scene evidenceblood, bones, hair, nail clippings, teetharrive at the lab. An Othram employee photographs the packages and then uploads the images to the companys online portal, where law enforcement agencies can keep tabs on their evidence. Each step of the process is documented to maintain a chain-of-custody record for use in subsequent legal proceedings. Especially with cold cases, tracking the circuitous route that evidence takesfrom a crime scene to a police property room to a forensic-testing lab and back to the property roomis critical. To discredit DNA evidence, defense attorneys will pounce on any potential contamination.

Othram technicians determine whether there is sufficient DNA to build a profile from the forensic material they receive. Unlike the cheek swabs used by medical testing companies, crime scene evidence often contains genetic samples from multiple individuals, and it can include plant or animal DNA. It also deteriorates over time. No matter how well the investigators try to keep it, its organic material, David explained. There are things that can developbacteria and other kinds of things. So that makes it tougher to read the data.

The lab ends up rejecting about a third of the evidence it receives. Better to wait until forensic technology improves, the Mittelmans believe, than make a futile bid to obtain a genetic profile. Each test uses up a portion of scarce crime scene DNA. Some forensic labs have destroyed entire samples without obtaining a profile. In medicine, you would never treat a patient if you had no idea whether it would help or not, Kristen said. If youre running the DNA on assays that dont work, youre consuming it, which means youre consuming someones last chance at justice.

Over time, Othram researchers have developed proprietary methods for obtaining profiles from ever-smaller amounts of DNA. In 2021 the lab established a new milestone by using just 120 picograms of DNAabout fifteen human cells worth of genetic materialto help identify the man who raped and murdered a fourteen-year-old Las Vegas girl, Stephanie Isaacson.

In the Edwards case, Othram technicians determined that the semen found on the vaginal swab had a high likelihood of yielding a strong DNA profile. They used a technique called differential extraction to distinguish the suspects sperm from Edwardss skin cells and other foreign material. Then they ran the sample through an Illumina NovaSeq 6000, a million-dollar whole-genome sequencer about the size of an office copier. Othrams custom software combed through the data for genetic markersunique DNA sequences that could be used to identify the suspect. To build a useful profile, Othram investigators need to find hundreds of thousands of such markers. In the Edwards case, they found more than half a million.

The genetic profile they developed was then uploaded, in the form of a digital text file, to a website called GEDmatch. Founded in 2010, the site maintains a database of more than 1.5 million profiles voluntarily submitted by users around the world, many of them hoping to find distant relatives. About 30 percent of those users have consented to law enforcement using their personal information to identify violent criminals. The website says it has helped solve more than four hundred cases.

The closest genetic match to the suspect in the database was a woman living in Louisiana. Based on their quantity of DNA in common, they appeared to be second cousins, which meant they shared a pair of great-grandparents. The woman might never have met the suspect or even known of his existence, but she had just become an unwitting genetic informer for the Beaumont Police Department. The information she provided was about to break the Catherine Edwards case wide open.

David Mittelmans path to Othram began in 1997, when he landed an internship at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, in Dallas, working on the Human Genome Projectthe thirteen-year, $3 billion effort to map our entire genetic composition. At the time, he was a precocious student at Pearce High School, in nearby Richardson. It just seemed like an exciting opportunity to learn more about what all these pieces of genetic information meant, Mittelman said. Intuitively, I could sense that this was going to be a real driver in changing how society works.

He continued working on the project while attending college at UT Dallas. His job was to build and program robots that would automate various lab processes. Genomics in the nineties was very labor-intensive, he explained. Back then, it was a lot of human stuff and a little bit of computer stuff. That has kind of flipped now. After earning a bachelors degree in neuroscience from UT Dallas and his doctorate, David took a professorship at Virginia Tech, where he won a National Institutes of Health grant to research the use of genetic data for medical diagnosis and treatment.

One day in the early 2010s, a representative from the FBI visited Virginia Tech to speak about the role of DNA in criminal investigations. Humans share roughly 99.9 percent of our genetic material, but all of us have DNA sequencestypically along portions of the genome whose functions arent yet well understoodthat feature enough mutations to distinguish us as individuals. By the mid-1980s, scientists had identified the location of thirteen such sequences, also known as markers, which became known as a DNA fingerprint. (The number has since expanded to twenty markers.) Because the odds of any two unrelated individuals sharing the same DNA fingerprint are infinitesimal, this test has become the standard in international law enforcement. But the method works only if police have a suspect from whom to collect a DNA sample. If the culprit remains at large, as in the Catherine Edwards murder, the method is all but useless.

During the discussion, David realized that the field of forensics was woefully behind the times. Rather than relying on twenty markers, scientists could now use whole-genome sequencing to obtain hundreds of thousands. Sequencing an entire genome would give police detailed information about a suspects ethnic background, eye color, sex, and skin pigmentation. It would be like going from monochrome to Technicolor. The FBI guy asked me how much it would cost, and I said thirty thousand to forty thousand dollars, David recalled. He laughed at me and left. At that time, the economics didnt make any sense.

David set aside the idea and continued working on the medical side of genetics. In 2012 he cofounded Arpeggi, a tech start-up that created software to help physicians sift through the avalanche of data produced by whole-genome sequencing. Within a year the company was acquired by Gene by Gene, the Houston-based parent company of the popular genetic testing website FamilyTreeDNA. David resigned from Virginia Tech and moved back to Texas to become Gene by Genes chief scientific officer. This gave him an introduction to the world of direct-to-consumer DNA testing, which had exploded in popularity. Although he soon left to work at a series of other biomedical companies, his experience at Gene by Gene planted the seed for Othram.

The costs were coming down on sequencing, he said. I had learned a lot at FamilyTreeDNA about how people interconnect genetically. It was, like, maybe the economics are where they need to be. The technology has largely been solved for medical diagnostics. So how can we take this powerful technology to do something good in the world? And thats what shifted my mindset back to the problem of forensics. David soon discovered that there were hundreds of thousands of unsolved murders and tens of thousands of unidentified bodies in the United States alone. Crime labs nationwide were struggling to keep up with new investigations, let alone decades-old cold cases. The more David learned, the more outraged he became. People do not understand the magnitude of this problem, he told me.

In 2018, with $4 million in seed money led by a San Franciscobased investment fund, David set up shop in a one-story office building in The Woodlands, a five-minute drive from his house. Kristen initially declined to take a job at the company because it seemed like such a long shot. I told him that he had lost his mind, she said. Who is going to give you evidence? Were medical people. We have no policing background whatsoever. And youre going to build a forensic lab?

Genetic genealogy is such a young field that few regulations or accreditation standards exist. David knew that he would have to win the trust of law enforcement agencies unfamiliar with whole-genome sequencing. He would have to convince them that such testing was worth the initial price tag of $10,000 per DNA sample. Perhaps most important, he would need to prove that his work would stand up in a courtroom.

Brandon Bess, a bluff, plainspoken Texas Ranger who lives in the small town of Anahuac, midway between Beaumont and Houston, visited the lab shortly after it opened. It was David and, like, three other people working there at the time, and it was kind of a dump, he recalled. My first impression of David was that he looked like a mad scientist. He had on a T-shirt that was too small and looked like he hadnt slept in about three days. He had hair going all over the place, a ripped-up pair of jeans, and a pair of tennis shoes. But he was very focused. And he could talk. (David told me Besss impression was accurateearly on at Othram, he would often work for days with little sleep.)

Whole-genome sequencers such as the NovaSeq 6000 were built to analyze fresh DNA obtained from cheek swabs. Othram had to design lab processes capable of extracting data from damaged and degraded genetic material, then create software to analyze it. David hired engineers and molecular biologists with experience pulling DNA from inhospitable media, such as formaldehyde and paraffin, which are known to scramble genetic information. We developed a number of tools, both in the laboratory and on the computer side, that allowed us to get reproducible and predictable success from forensic samples, he said.

In 2019 Othram built a DNA profile that enabled investigators to identify a skeleton discovered in an Idaho cave in 1979 as the remains of Henry Loveless, a bootlegger and counterfeiter who was murdered in 1916. Then, in 2020, the lab received a flood of publicity after helping to solve the 1974 murder of Carla Walker, a seventeen-year-old Fort Worth high school student.

The company soon began announcing new successes on an almost weekly basis. It helped identify the perpetrators of the 1974 abduction and murder of a five-year-old girl from Montana; the 1977 rape and murder of a 77-year-old North Carolina woman; and the 1984 rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl in Canada. There were also many John and Jane Does it helped identify. A victim of a traffic accident on a Pennsylvania road in 1987. A corpse fished out of a lake in Washington State in 1994. A woman who mysteriously drowned in a Pecos hotel swimming pool in 1966.

To publicize Othrams work, Mittelman capitalized on Americas fascination with true crime. He became a regular speaker at CrimeCon, the popular annual true-crime conference, and he consulted on a 2021 episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit that featured a forensic genealogy lab inspired by Othram. The company hosts a private genetic database where users can upload their DNA data in hopes of helping solve a crime, and it has launched dozens of crowdfunding campaigns to finance work on cold cases around the country. On social media, Othram advertises its successful investigations and solicits donations.

Among the companys earliest large donors was Carla Davis, a self-taught genealogist from Mississippi who came across one of Othrams fund-raising campaigns on LinkedIn in late 2020. She gave tens of thousands of dollars that helped fund the identification of several sets of remains found in Mississippi between 1977 and 2020. Law enforcement agencies there are so underfunded, Davis recently told me over Zoom from her home in Dubai, where she and her husband have a real estate investment company. I was just trying to help give my home state the technology to solve their cases.

After Davis continued to lend Othram both financial support and genealogical expertise, the company hired her two years ago to lead its thirteen-employee genealogy team. Working remotely, Davis and her team have assisted in more than four hundred cases. Its really exciting to be part of this moment, she said. Were going to see so many more companies using this technology and more cases being solved. I think were not going to have cold cases in the future.

According to the business-research platform Crunchbase, over the past six years Othram has raised nearly $36 million in venture capital. Among its biggest investors is Gigafund, the Austin-based firm best known for its stake in several of Elon Musks companies, including the Boring Company, Neuralink, and SpaceX. Our investors are interested in the decade-long transformational shift in the way forensic genetic testing is done, David said. They understand its a long game. Like many tech start-ups, Othram has spent its early years burning through money in pursuit of its goals. In 2022 it moved to another office building in The Woodlandswith quadruple the lab space and additional room for a staff that now numbers more than sixty. It currently charges law enforcement agencies only enough to cover the incremental costs of an investigation, though David said that wont remain the case as economies of scale bring those costs down. He also plans to reach profitability by licensing the companys software and processes to other forensic labs.

Othram has attracted criticism for what some consider its sharp- elbowed business practices. In January, the company announced an exclusive partnership with FamilyTreeDNA, one of only two major databases that grant law enforcement agencies access to their profiles. (The other is GEDmatch, which is owned by Netherlands-based biotechnology company Qiagen.) Labs hoping to use FamilyTreeDNA to identify a suspect now have to use Othram software. In the wake of the announcement, the nonprofits DNA Doe Project and Intermountain Forensics temporarily stopped using FamilyTreeDNA. They were seeking additional clarification, so I personally got on the phone with them to talk them through the partnership, Mittelman said. Both organizations have since resumed working with FamilyTreeDNA.

Meanwhile, the field of genetic genealogy has come under fire from civil liberties groups concerned about the privacy of users who upload their DNA information to websites such as GEDmatch, and from bioethicists who worry about the dearth of federal regulation. DNA is valuableto governments, to bioscience companies, and to the policeand genetic databases, like anything else that lives online, can be hacked. Mittelman says he shares some of these concerns but points out that users submit their DNA to these sites voluntarily and can opt out of law enforcement searches.

Forensic genetic genealogy relies on a certain degree of ethical ambiguity. After a lab such as Othram identifies a potential culprit, detectives must then collect the suspects DNAoften surreptitiouslyin order to match it to DNA found at the crime scene. Usually this is done by taking items from a suspects garbage, as in the Golden State Killer case. According to long-standing legal precedent, police typically do not need a warrant to obtain evidence from garbage that has been left on the curb. So far, courts have ruled that the same holds true for the DNA in that trash.

Some experts, including Teneille Brown, a law professor at the University of Utah who has written about forensic genetic genealogy, argue that courts should declare the furtive seizing of someones DNA to be a violation of the Fourth Amendments prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures. Obtaining someones entire genetic profile, after all, constitutes a significantly greater invasion of privacy than merely rummaging through their food scraps. DNA is not garbage, so we shouldnt be treating it like that, Brown told me. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed several amicus briefs opposing warrantless DNA collection.

Mittelman professes not to concern himself with such constitutional questions, deferring to the legal experts. For him and most law enforcement agencies, what matters is the ability to identify a victim or a suspect. At that Othram has proved remarkably successful. During one week in late May, the lab announced its role in solving six cases, including one murder and five unidentified bodies. And it is increasingly called upon to assist in active investigations. Earlier this year, Othram helped identify Victor Antonio Martinez-Hernandez, a fugitive from El Salvador, as a suspect in the 2023 murder of Maryland mother Rachel Morin. Martinez-Hernandez was arrested in June and charged with murder and rape.

With genetic-testing technology improving rapidly, the biggest remaining hurdle to solving cold cases may be money. These cases move at the speed of funding, David told me. In the United States, the largest single source of law enforcement funding is the federal government. This is where Kristen Mittelman comes in. After earning her doctorate, she worked as an intellectual-property specialist at Houston law firm Baker Botts before moving with David to Virginia Tech, where she became the universitys director of grants and contracts. In 2021 Kristen joined Othram, where she spends much of her time in Washington, D.C., lobbying Congress for money. He was struggling with funding, she told me. And I knew I was good at getting federal funding.

Thanks in part to Kristens efforts, Republican congressman Kelly Armstrong, of North Dakota, introduced the Carla Walker Act in 2022. Named after the Fort Worth teenager whose murder Othram helped solve, the bill would provide $20 million in grants to law enforcement agencies for forensic genetic genealogy investigations. The bill has yet to make it out of committee. Last August, U.S. senator John Cornyn traveled to The Woodlands to meet the Mittelmans and tour Othram. During a press conference at the lab, he promised to introduce a version of the Carla Walker Act in the Senate. This sort of technology is critical to solving crime and protecting public safety, he declared.

Kristen is working with Cornyns office to draft the proposed legislation, which she says will include reporting requirements to assess the work of forensic genetic genealogy labs. The Mittelmans worry about the damage an unscrupulous lab could do to the reputation of their nascent industry. There are so many companies out there selling the quickest way to make a profile with fewer markers, Kristen said. Because there are currently no metrics of success in forensics, people are taking shortcuts. This needs to be done predictably. You need to start collecting metrics, find technologies that work, and fund the implementation of those technologies.

After identifying the likely second cousin of Catherine Edwardss killer, Othram passed its findings to Beaumont detective Aaron Lewallen, who was now working with Brandon Bess, the Texas Ranger. Othram has an in-house genealogy team, but some law enforcement agencies use their own genealogist. In this case, Lewallen happened to know one willing to work for free: his wife.

Tina Lewallen, a detective in the auto crimes division of Beaumont Police Department, first got interested in genealogy in the nineties, to explore her family history. When direct-to-consumer DNA testing became available, she submitted a cheek swab to AncestryDNA. The results ruled out the French heritage her family had always claimed. That fascinated me, because DNA doesnt lie, Tina recently told me in her windowless Beaumont office, which was decorated with mug shots of suspected car thieves. A pair of rose-pink handcuffs, a gift from her husband, were clipped to her belt.

Othram provided Tina with a list of the suspects closest relatives on GEDmatch, along with how much DNA each shared and their likely familial relationship. The listed email address for one of the relatives, Paul Thomas LaPoint, led to his daughter-in-law, a professional genealogist named Shera LaPoint who lives in the small town of Bunkie, Louisiana, about eighty miles northwest of Baton Rouge. Shera had submitted Paul Thomass DNA to GEDmatch years before. Stunned to learn that her father-in-law was related to a suspected killer, she volunteered to help the Beaumont detectives with the case. After vetting her, the Lewallens brought Shera onto the team, forwarding the list they received from Othram.

It was a bunch of Cajun names, many of them people that I knew, because a lot of them are also into genealogy, Shera told me. Forensic genetic genealogy investigations start by identifying the most recent common ancestor between the suspect and their closest genetic match. In the Edwards case, the search was complicated by the suspects Cajun ancestry. Cajuns descend from a small colony of French Canadians who were expelled by the British in the mid-1700s and found refuge in Louisiana. Over the centuries, some members of the tight-knit Catholic community engaged in intermarriage with close relatives, such as cousins. As a result, performing genetic genealogy in Cajun families can be notoriously complex. Shera and her father-in-law, for instance, share thirteen ancestors. In a perfect world, when you look at DNA matches for a person who has tested on AncestryDNA or FamilyTreeDNA, you should be able to separate their four grandparents lines, Shera said. But when youre looking at Cajun DNA, its very difficult, because your maternal grandmother may be related to your paternal grandfather. So it makes it very difficult to find the common ancestor youre looking for.

Using Ancestry.com, which bills itself as the worlds largest genealogy site, Shera and Tina built a family tree for the presumed second cousin, going back in time until they identified her eight great-grandparents. Then they started working back down, following branches of the tree in search of a descendant who lived in Beaumont when Catherine Edwards was killed. But that effort led to a dead end. Because the family was Cajun, they realized, the presumed second cousin might actually be the suspects third cousin. Shera and Tina were forced to go back another generation, to the womans great-great-grandparents. They ended up with a family tree of more than 7,400 names.

To narrow the search, they asked Aaron Lewallen and Bess to request DNA samples from living members of these families. The detectives spent days driving around Texas and Louisiana, collecting dozens of cheek swabs. I thought it was going to be difficult to talk people out of their DNA, Aaron recalled. But youd be amazed how many people are out there interested in helping out. Theres a lot of true-crime buffs. Each swab was sent to Othram, which sequenced the DNA and uploaded it to GEDmatch. The results let Shera and Tina rule out entire family lines.

About three months into the investigation, Sheras research led to a husband and wife whod lived in Beaumont in the sixties. Birth records indicated that the couple had two sons who would have been about the same age as Edwards. Shera texted Tina and Aaron, who ran the names of the couples sons through a criminal background search. One of the brothers came up clean, but the other had a record. In 1981, Clayton Bernard Foreman had pleaded guilty to aggravated assault in Beaumont. I was like, holy shit, Aaron recalled. Its him.

According to the case file, Foreman, then a 21-year-old Nabisco salesman, had been driving through Beaumont when he saw a young woman whod had car trouble. Foreman stopped to offer her a ride, claiming to be a cop. He drove the woman to a secluded area, threatened to cut her throat with a knife, tied her hands behind her back with a belt, and raped her. About two weeks later, the traumatized woman went to the police. Foreman readily confessed, explaining that he had been out drinking and just got carried away. In exchange for pleading guilty to aggravated assault, he received three years of probation. Aaron soon learned that Foreman and Edwards were three years apart at Forest Park High School. Edwards and her twin sister, Allison, had even been bridesmaids at Foremans 1982 wedding.

An online search revealed that Foreman, now 61, was living with his fiance in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, where he worked as an Uber driver. An officer from the local police department was dispatched to collect bags of trash from outside Foremans house. Several of the discarded items, including dental floss and plastic tableware, were sent to the Texas Department of Public Safety crime lab in Houston for testing. Foremans DNA was a clear match to that of the semen from Edwardss vaginal swab.

On April 29, 2021, Aaron and Bess flew to Ohio, where they met Foreman face-to-face at the local police station. A video recording of the interrogation shows an obese man with a receding hairline, thick glasses, and a pronounced East Texas accent. At first the detectives act as though they are merely seeking information about Edwardss murder. Foreman says he vaguely remembers her being a bridesmaid at his wedding but denies having any other contact with her or even knowing that she is dead. Only after being told that his semen had been found in her body does Foreman stop talking and ask to see a lawyer.

Aaron and Bess allowed Foreman to leave the interrogation room unimpeded. On his way out of the station, he was stopped and handcuffed by police officers. Foreman may have recognized the handcuffs. They had been sitting in an evidence room for nearly three decades, until Aaron and Bess received special approval to take them to Ohio. They were the same pair that had been found on Edwards in 1995.

After a three-year delay caused in part by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Clayton Foreman trial began on March 11 in downtown Beaumont. The visitors gallery was packed. Foreman sat calmly beside his attorney at the defense table, wearing an inscrutable expression. He had pleaded not guilty; if convicted, he would face a mandatory life sentence. Prosecutors decided not to seek the death penalty.

One of the first witnesses was Allison Brocato, now sixty years old with shoulder-length hair and matronly glasses. She spoke about her closeness with her twin sister, noting that she and her husband named their second daughter Catherine. After the murder, she said, the family was never the same. I think my parents died a little bit, too, when she did, Brocato told the jury, through tears. Neither lived to see the arrest of their daughters killer.

The prosecution also called Foremans former wife, Dianna Coe, who testified that she had learned about Foremans rape charge just three weeks before their wedding. When she confronted him, he claimed that the arrest was a big misunderstanding, and that the charges had been dropped. Coe, who was nineteen and had been dating Foreman for three years, decided to go ahead with the wedding. In 1984 she and Foreman had a son, who later attended Price Elementary while Edwards was teaching there.

One day Foreman confessed to his wife that in high school he felt protective of Edwards and Brocato. He thought they were so cute because they were twins, Coe testified. I didnt think anything of it at the time. Sometime around 1987, Coe discovered a briefcase in the trunk of Foremans car. Inside it was a gun, a pair of handcuffs, and pornographic material. The couple divorced in 1993. Years later, when Coe learned that Edwards had been murdered, she called her ex-husband to tell him the news. He had no feeling whatsoever, she recalled. It dumbfounded me.

David Mittelman took the stand on the third day of the trial. Wearing a white shirt and blue blazer, with a relatively clean-shaven face and hair that looked recently barbered, he patiently walked the jury through Othrams role in the Edwards case. Although the labs work has been used to convict dozens of murderers, this was Mittelmans first time to testify before a jury. He explained that Othram had found more than half a million genetic markers in the crime scene DNA, far in excess of what is necessary to produce a workable profile.

After seven days of testimony, the case went to the jury. It had taken nearly three decades to identify a suspect in the murder of Catherine Edwards, but it took the jury less than an hour to find Foreman guilty. He received an automatic life sentence and will be eligible for parole in thirty years, when he is 93. After the trial, one of the jurors gave an interview to a Beaumont TV station. He said it was the DNA evidence that convinced the jury of Foremans guilt: You cant deny that.

In the wake of the verdict, Mittelman expressed pride in having helped to resolve the three-decade-long investigation. Unsolved cases take an immense toll on families, he told me. Knowing that our technology has played even the smallest role in bringing both answers and then justice is profoundly moving.

The future is already here, novelist William Gibson once observed. Its just not very evenly distributed. David and Kristen Mittelman believe that forensic genetic genealogy will one day become as commonplace as fingerprint analysis. For now, this investigative tool still suffers technical limitations, including the relatively homogeneous geographical origin of the DNA profiles on GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA, most of which come from Australia, Europe, and North America. The majority of forensic genetic genealogy teams are located in the United States.

Considerable need exists for this technology. As crime spiked around the country during the COVID-19 pandemic, law enforcement agencies were tasked with investigating a tide of new offensesmore than one million violent crimes a year in the U.S.with a steady or shrinking number of officers. Every crime that isnt solved adds to the growing number of cold cases. In addition to hundreds of thousands of unsolved murders in the U.S., there are countless rape kits sitting in evidence rooms nationwide. For a variety of reasons, including insufficient funding, many have not received any kind of DNA testing.

Even when a kit does get tested, nearly always for the standard twenty genetic markers in a DNA fingerprint, it often doesnt match any of the profiles in the FBIs Combined DNA Index System. In those cases, police must either wait for the rapist to strike againleaving DNA at another crime sceneor pay for forensic genetic genealogy. Although costs are coming down, the method still runs about $10,000 per case, in addition to the expense of hiring a skilled genealogist. America spends more than $100 billion every year on law enforcement, but little of that is earmarked for forensic genetic genealogy. The amount of money it costs to investigate a case using traditional methods is absurd, David said. And the vast majority of it goes to salaries.

Thats why Othram sees government support as essential. Only Congress has the resources to fund genetic genealogy work at scale, and only Congress has the power to encourage local police departments to make use of itperhaps by threatening to withhold federal grants. (In the eighties, the federal government compelled states to raise the drinking age to 21 by indicating it would hold highway funding hostage.) But to be eligible for such funding, genetic genealogy will likely need to emerge from its Wild West era and embrace regulation. David and Kristen told me that Othram would welcome such a change. For a technology to be successful, it has to be predictable, Kristen said. Thats how medical testing works. Thats how almost everything works that is funded by the government.

Like many start-up founders, David balances his frustration at present circumstances with a supreme confidence about whats yet to come. He predicted that the technology pioneered at his modest lab in The Woodlands will one day become standard in police departments throughout the world. There was a sentiment, especially in the early years, that cases like Catherine Edwardss were remarkable one-off successesthings that are extraordinary, he told me. Were trying to go from the extraordinary to the ordinary.

This article originally appeared in the August 2024 issue ofTexas Monthlywith the headline Decoding a Killers DNA.Subscribe today.

Link:
Inside the Texas Crime Lab Thats Cracked Hundreds of Cold Cases - Texas Monthly

STONY BROOK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / July 18, 2024 / Applied DNA Sciences, Inc. (NASDAQ:APDN) (Applied DNA), a leader in PCR-based DNA technologies, today announced that the U.S. Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) exercised the first one-year option period of a three-year base contract with two one-year option periods entered into in May 2021. The contract supports DLA's counterfeit mitigation initiatives and product verification and testing programs specific to FSC 5962 microcircuits. The maximal value of the indefinite delivery contract is $1.04 million over an up to five-year performance term. The option-year exercise continues Applied DNA's support of DLA's counterfeit mitigation program, which has been running since 2014.

"We are pleased to enable DLA to maintain program continuity in service of the nation's defense capabilities and further reinforce the application of our forensic DNA mark as a secure, high-resolution taggant to track provenance and ensure authenticity," said Judy Murrah, chief operating officer of Applied DNA.

About Applied DNA Sciences

Applied DNA Sciences is a biotechnology company developing technologies to produce and detect deoxyribonucleic acid ("DNA"). Using the polymerase chain reaction ("PCR") to enable both the production and detection of DNA, we operate in three primary business markets: (i) the enzymatic manufacture of synthetic DNA for use in the production of nucleic acid-based therapeutics and, through our recent acquisition of Spindle Biotech, Inc. ("Spindle"), the development and sale of a proprietary RNA polymerase ("RNAP") for use in the production of mRNA therapeutics; (ii) the detection of DNA and RNA in molecular diagnostics and genetic testing services; and (iii) the manufacture and detection of DNA for industrial supply chain security services.

Visit adnas.com for more information. Follow us on X and LinkedIn. Join our mailing list.

Forward-Looking Statements

The statements made by Applied DNA in this press release may be "forward-looking" in nature within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements describe Applied DNA's future plans, projections, strategies, and expectations, and are based on assumptions and involve a number of risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the control of Applied DNA. Actual results could differ materially from those projected due to its history of net losses, limited financial resources, the unknown future demand by the U.S. Defense Logistics Agency for its supply chain traceability service, and various other factors detailed from time to time in Applied DNA's SEC reports and filings, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K, as amended, filed on December 7, 2023 and Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q filed on February 8, 2024, and May 10, 2024, and other reports it files with the SEC, which are available at http://www.sec.gov. Applied DNA undertakes no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statements to reflect new information, events, or circumstances after the date hereof or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, unless otherwise required by law.

Contacts:

Applied DNA Sciences Investor Relations contact: Sanjay M. Hurry, 917-733-5573, [emailprotected] Web: http://www.adnas.com Twitter: @APDN

SOURCE: Applied DNA Sciences, Inc.

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U.S. Defense Logistics Agency Exercises 1-Year Option Period in Applied DNA Counterfeit Mitigation Contract - AccessWire

Thanks to Jack Lovegrove for the answer!

James - Can you extract DNA from fossils? Thanks, Phil. You've struck upon the fabulous field of ancient DNA. To help me answer your question. We put in a call to Jack Lovegrove at the Natural History Museum

Jack - For the majority of fossils, the answer is no. Traditionally, when we think of fossils, we are thinking of things that are many million years old. As the fossil is trapped in the sediment and the sediment is squished down and lithified turned to rock, pore waters get into the fossil and replace the original bone with different minerals, and the bone is remineralised, in effect, turned into stone. However, we now have been able to extract DNA from some of the most recent fossils. So the oldest DNA that's been extracted directly from a fossil comes from just over a million years ago, which was from a mammoth tooth that was found in the permafrost. The actual oldest DNA that's been extracted from anywhere comes not directly from a fossil, but from the sediment itself. And that's from a site in Greenland and about 2 million years old.

James - That's interesting. So some of that biological material preserves for millions of years. Life on Earth though, as we know, has been going on for tens and hundreds of millions of years. What's the limiting factor to DNA hanging around for longer, perhaps? Is it, as Paul suggests on our forum, DNA is strung together by means of phosphate ether bonds, which are not the most stable of chemical bonds.

Jack - Paul is right. I'd say there are two main limiting factors, and one of them is that DNA is not a very robust molecule compared to some other organic molecules and organic components of living things. So for example, there have been some controversial studies that have reported finding tiny traces of organic material from much older fossils. So even up to about 190 million years old. But even then, they're not talking about DNA. They're talking about very degraded remnants of collagen and maybe individual amino acids. It's been suggested, have been found in egg shells, but not DNA because it does fall apart. And the second reason that we don't find DNA is that most fossils have been remineralised. So all the organic material has been replaced with inorganic minerals.

James - Your specialty at the Natural History Museum is dinosaurs. It's bad news for those who are helping one day, we might uncover dinosaur DNA. Or is it?

Jack - In terms of non-bird dinosaurs, I would say it's very unlikely we're going to get DNA from their fossils. Sort of last of the non-bird dinosaurs, things like triceratops, that's about 66 million years ago. And then the stuff I work on, the earliest dinosaurs, you're looking at at least 240 million years ago. So sort of an order of magnitude out.

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Can we get DNA out of fossils? - The Naked Scientists

After 24 years, a significant breakthrough has occurred in the cold case of Sherry Holtz, who was found murdered in Sanford in December 1999. The Sanford Police Department has confirmed the arrest of Gary Durrance, 73, on Thursday, formerly Holtz's boyfriend, in connection with her death, modern DNA evidence gleaned from a knife found near the victim's body connects Durrance to the crime, according to ClickOrlando.

Police recounted how Holtz's body was discovered with evidence of a cut-throat, blunt force trauma, strangulation, and sexual battery, her body was found lying on a concrete slab in a wooded area behind a South Orlando Drive business, and while a sexual assault kit initially did not yield DNA evidence, a lock-blade knife recovered at the scene did contain human blood though it could not be tested at the time due to the small sample size, so the knife was preserved for over two decades, updated testing has now positively identified Durrance's DNA on the knife handle and Holtz's blood on the blade, "This was, theres no other way to describe it but a brutal homicide, OK? She was found laying on her back on a concrete slab approximately 20 feet into the wood line. Her clothing was pulled off, exposing most of her body," Sanford police strategic communications manager Bianca Gillett stated, as detailed by ClickOrlando.

Durrance and Holtz had a turbulent relationship, marked by repeatedly documented domestic violence incidents. According to interviews, the night before Holtz was last seen, an argument led to her expulsion from their shared residence, she was subsequently seen at a local bar and never returned.

Sanford Police Chief Cecil Smith addressed the gravity of the murder and the relief brought by the arrest saying, "24 years ago, Sherry Holtz was brutally murdered and left behind in the woods as if her life had no value. This was someone's mother, someone's daughter. Durrance will now face justice for the horrible and despicable things that he did." With Durrance now facing a second-degree homicide charge, he remains in the Seminole County Jail as reported by WESH.

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Arrest Made After 24 Years in Sanford Cold Case Murder, Modern DNA Evidence Links Suspect to 1999 Crime - Hoodline

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Researchers have developed tiny, potent molecules that are capable of targeting hidden strains of HIV. The source? Antibody genes from llama DNA.

For the study in the journal Advanced Science, lead author Jianliang Xu, assistant professor of biology at Georgia State University, used llama-derived nanobodies to broadly neutralize numerous strains of HIV-1, the most common form of the virus.

This virus has evolved a way to escape our immune system. Conventional antibodies are bulky, so its difficult for them to find and attack the virus surface, Xu explains. These new antibodies can do this in an easier way.

Scientists in pursuit of effective HIV treatment and prevention have been working with animals in the camelid familylike llamasfor about 15 years. Thats because the shape and features of their antibodies make them nimbler and more effective at identifying and neutralizing foreign objects, like the HIV virus.

The new research presents a widely applicable method to enhance the performance of nanobodies. Nanobodies are engineered antibody fragments that are about one-tenth the size of a conventional antibody. They are derived from flexible, Y-shaped heavy chain-only antibodiesmade up of two heavy chainswhich are more effective at fighting certain viruses than conventional antibodies with light chains.

For the study, the researchers immunized llamas with a specially designed protein which results in the production of neutralizing nanobodies. Xu and his team then identified nanobodies that can target vulnerable sites on the virus. When the team engineered the nanobodies into a triple tandem formatby repeating short lengths of DNAthe resulting nanobodies demonstrated remarkable effectiveness, neutralizing 96% of a diverse panel of HIV-1 strains.

Further analysis uncovered that these nanobodies mimic the recognition of the CD4 receptora key player in HIV infection. To enhance their potency, the nanobodies were fused with a broadly neutralizing antibody (bNAb), resulting in a new antibody with unprecedented neutralizing abilities.

Instead of developing a cocktail of antibodies, now we can make a single molecule that can neutralize HIV, Xu says. We are working with a broadly neutralizing nanobody that can neutralize over 90% of the circulating HIV strains, and when we combine that with another bNAb which also neutralizes some 90%, together, they can neutralize close to 100%.

Xu began this research at the National Institutes of Health Vaccine Research Center in Bethesda, Maryland, where he collaborated with a team of more than 30 scientists. The team included Peter Kwong, professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at Columbia University and coauthor of the study.

Since coming to Georgia State in 2023, Xu has been mentoring PhD candidate Payton Chan. Together, they are working to expand these potential remedies. Chan says she is excited about the prospects of the innovative research.

These nanobodies are the best and most potently neutralizing antibodies to date, which I think is very promising for the future of HIV therapeutics and antibody research. I hope one day there will be approval of these nanobodies for the treatment of HIV.

According to Xu, future efforts will explore the possibility of combining llama nanobodies with other existing bNAbs to determine if some of these combinations can achieve 100% neutralization to offer new treatment options in the fight against HIV.

Source: Georgia State

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Promising new HIV therapy comes from llama DNA - Futurity: Research News

July 17, 2024 BioCardia, Inc., a company focused on cellular and cell-derived therapeutics for the treatment of cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases announced that the Unites States Patent Office has granted Patent No: 12,036,371 titled Method of Accessing the Left Atrium with a Multi-Directional Steerable Catheter, with a patent term that will expire in 2035.

The present invention relates to medical methods for transseptal access to the heart using steerable introducers based on the Companys Morph DNA technology. This additional patent protection for BioCardias current and future products in this important existing market enhances shareholder value.

Procedures that leverage transseptal delivery include atrial fibrillation ablation, patent foramen ovale (PFO) and atrial septal defect (ASD) repair, percutaneous mitral valve repair, left atrial appendage closure, and percutaneous left ventricular assist device placement, among others. Worldwide revenue from the transseptal access systems market was $941.3 million in 2022, with the global market estimated to expand at a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 7.3%, reaching $2.1 billion by the end of 2033.

Morph DNA designs enable the tensioning elements in the catheter to rotate around the catheter shaft, allowing consistent catheter performance in any direction. The DNA name reflects this design, as these tensioning elements appear as a double helix like that in a strand of DNA. This design is intended to enable smooth navigation and prevent whip, when the build-up of mechanical forces in the device causes a catheter to suddenly jump from one orientation to another.

All of the biotherapeutic interventions we support for treatment of heart failure, refractory angina, and acute myocardial infarction going forward are expected to utilize this same introducer technology platform, said Peter Altman, PhD, BioCardias President and Chief Executive Officer. This is an elegant solution to a long-standing technical issue. The solution enhances the level of physician control in our procedures, and BioCardia is working to provide or partner this solution for the roughly five hundred thousand transseptal procedures performed in the United States each year, and for other vascular access markets that can benefit from the advantages our patented solution provides.

For more information: http://www.biocardia.com

Link:
BioCardia Announces United States Patent Issuance on Morph DNA Multi-Directional Steerable Catheter Transseptal Application - Diagnostic and...

The bodies of the two Ukrainian soldiers lay motionless in a field for months. Around them were bloodstains and their rifles.

The soldiers relatives identified their bodies from aerial footage gathered by drone. Though excruciating to watch, it seemed clear: The two men Pvt. Serhiy Matsiuk and Pvt. Andriy Zaretsky were dead. Yet more than four months later, the Ukrainian military still lists them as missing, even though subsequent drone footage provided by a fellow soldier weeks later showed them still lying there.

I want to have his grave where I can come and cry all this out properly, said Private Zaretskys wife, Anastasia, 31, who has been looking for closure since he was killed in November in the Zaporizhzhia region in Ukraines south.

This confusion, and the lengthy, difficult process of obtaining official declaration of the deaths, is far from isolated, and has emerged as another painful consequence of the two-year-old war.

Families, lawyers and rights groups say that the Ukrainian military is simply overloaded with casualties and unable to account for thousands of the dead, adding to the anguish of soldiers families.

Relatives of the two men in the field said that as far as they know, the bodies are still laying on the ground in the Zaporizhzhia region in Ukraines south.

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DNA Tests and Stranded Bodies: Ukraine's Struggle to Name Its Dead - The New York Times

Featured Image Credit: Inside Edition

Published 15:58 2 May 2024 GMT+1

I think we've all had that one moment when out in public and gone, 'That person looks a lot like me'.

Of course, most of the time it ends up being someone that just looks a lot like you.

However, not all stories end up like that, just ask two identical-looking athletes with same name.

When you look very alike and work in the same field, then why not have a DNA test to provide some answers.

Brady Feigl is a 6'4 baseball player with red hair, a red beard and thick glasses

And, somehow, another Brady Feigl is also a 6'4 baseball player with red hair, a red beard and thick glasses.

Quite the story already, eh?

Somehow, there are two baseball-playing Brady Feigls out there and they look very alike too.

One of the players is a a pitcher for the Pericos de Puebla in Mexico, while the other is a pitcher for the Oakland Athletics but was released by the organization in June 2023.

The two athletes are so similar that everyone who sees them can't help but think: are they long-lost brothers?

Even they started to wonder whether they were related after a while. So, Inside Edition got them together to do a DNA test in the hopes of figuring it out once and for all.

It wouldn't be the first time a pair of long-lost siblings had ended up living insanely similar lives.

One of the most famous examples of this were the 'Jim twins', identical twins who were separated at birth and put up for adoption before discovering each other later in life.

When they finally reunited they realised they'd had the same interests along with a brother called Larry, a childhood dog named Toy, a first wife called Linda and a second wife named Betty.

They'd even both unknowingly given their firstborn sons the same name, and liked the same type of beer and brand of cigarettes.

Sadly for anyone hoping for another instance of the 'Jim twins' with the 'Brady twins', DNA testing revealed that these almost identical guys living almost identical lives weren't actually related after all.

Their one big similarity from the DNA test was the level of Germanic ancestry, with both registering as 53 percent Germanic in origin, but on every other measure they were different and therefore not secret siblings.

Hopes of some incredible family reunion were dashed, but the two Bradys are glad they met each other and said they were 'still brothers in a way.'

Doppelgngers like Brady and Brady actually aren't uncommon.

Apparently, every person in the world has about six of them. Nearly as unbelievable as these two having the same name, ay?

Topics:Sport, Baseball

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Two identical-looking athletes with same name get DNA test to see if they are long-lost siblings - UNILAD