Category Archives: DNA

In 2004, two young women were abducted at gunpoint while walking home near Boston at night. The crimes happened eight days apart, but the pattern was the same: The women were shoved into a car by two men, pistol-whipped, driven to a different location, and raped. While collecting her clothes, the second victim managed to grab the condom one of the men had worn; she hid it in her pocket, and turned it in as evidence.

One of the two men involved pleaded guilty to the attacks in 2012. The other remained at large. Police had a suspect, but they couldnt pin the crime on him due to a twist of genetic fate: He had an identical twin brother, and DNA from the condom matched both siblings. But now, a decade after the assaults, scientists have developed a genetic test that can distinguish between identical twins, and it may be used in court for the first time in this case.

The second suspect is 33-year-old Dwayne McNair. In September, McNair was arraigned on eight counts of aggravated rape and two counts of armed robbery, stemming from the two sexual assaults.

Traditional forensic methods cant differentiate between DNA belonging to identical twins

Hes been a suspect in the crimes since 2007. According to court documents, a standard genetic test linked him to semen collected from the second attack back in 2008. That would ordinarily be enough to justify charges, but Dwayne wasnt the only person whose DNA matched that semen. His twin, Dwight, was also a match. Traditional forensic methods cant differentiate between DNA belonging to identical twins, and without a clear way to establish whether Dwayne or Dwight had left the semen at the scene, police had no probable cause to make an arrest in 2008.

But in 2012, the other man involved in the assaults told investigatorsthat Dwayne had been his partner in the crimes. And earlier this year, prosecutors learned of a new forensic genetics test claiming to differentiate between biological samples belonging to identical twins. According to the Suffolk County District Attorney the test points to Dwayne, not Dwight, as the perpetrator of the 2004 assaults.

Normally, forensic tests work by extracting and amplifying regions of DNA collected from a crime scene. Then, investigators look for a match between the evidence and a suspects genetic sequence. Ordinarily, this kind of testing is sufficient: Most humans vary from one another enough for investigators to easily identify whether a suspect left blood, skin, hair, semen, or something else at a crime scene.

This is not true with identical twins. Grown from the same, single fertilized egg, monozygotic twins have nearly identical genomes. So, for decades, twins committing crimes had a relatively easy way to establish doubtbased on DNA evidence alone, their identical sibling would be equally as likely to have deposited whatever genetic material might have been left at a crime scene.

Maybe not anymore.

Using whats known as ultra-deep, next-generation sequencing, a team in Germany has developed a test that claims to reliably identify which twin a biological sample belongs to. The test works by taking a close look at thegenetic letters (called base pairs) comprisingthe 3 billion-base-pair human genome. Because mutations randomly occur during development, even genetically identical twins will vary at a handful of locations, says Burkhard Rolf, a forensic scientist at Eurofins Scientific, the company that developed the test.

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DNA Test That Distinguishes Identical Twins May Be Used in Court for First Time

The 1962 Nobel Prize Medal in Medicine or Physiology that James Watson won has been sold at auction. Christie's hide caption

The 1962 Nobel Prize Medal in Medicine or Physiology that James Watson won has been sold at auction.

The Nobel Prize medal that James Watson won for helping explain how DNA is structured has a new owner, as the 1962 gold medal was bought for more than $4.75 million at auction Thursday. Watson has said he'll donate much of the money to educational institutions.

The identity of the winning bidder, who participated by phone, has not been revealed.

The first-ever sale of a Nobel prize by a living recipient follows a new period of controversy for Watson, 86, who's been accused of both racism and sexism, dating back to the exclusion of scientist Rosalind Franklin from the acclaim his research team garnered for discovering that DNA's structure is a double helix. (An NPR interview with Watson touched on that story.)

The criticism was most severe, however, in 2007, when Watson said the intelligence of some races, such as people of African descent, was limited. The comments brought wide criticism, and Watson later apologized.

Against that backdrop, many observers see Watson's sale of the Nobel as either "a quest for redemption" (The New York Times) or "sticking his tongue out at the scientific establishment." (Slate)

We'll note that both of the Nobel medals that Watson and famous partner, Francis Crick, were awarded have now been sold. The family of Crick, who died in 2004, auctioned his medal last year, for $2.27 million.

If you're wondering what the medals are made of, Christie's explains:

"Prior to 1980 the Nobel Prize medal was made from 23 carat gold, but since then Nobel Prize medals are made of 18 carat green gold plated with 24 carat gold. The diameter of the Nobel Prize medal is 66 mm but the weight and thickness varies with the price of gold. The average Nobel Prize medal is 175 g with a thickness ranging from 2.4-5.2 mm."

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DNA Pioneer Watson's Nobel Prize Sells For $4.75 Million

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Researchers know he died in battle and had back trouble. Now, DNA analysis has shed light on what Richard III looked like -- and raised surprising questions about the rightful passage of the crown after his tragically short reign ended in 1485.

In a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications, researchers said the DNA analyses found that the last English king to die in battle, some 500 years ago, most likely had blue eyes and blond hair, closing more of the historical gaps in what we know of the mysterious monarch.

A twisted skeleton was first discovered under a church parking lot back in 2012, setting off a CSI-like investigation into whether it was indeed Richard III. Five months later, DNA evidence proved it was the king.

The new research carved out previously unknown genetic details about the royal find.

"We were able to zoom in on 11 genes with 24 little differences in those genes that can help us predict what somebody's hair and eye color is going to be," said University of Leicester geneticist Turi King, who in earlier work had found matches between DNA from the skeleton and two direct descendants of Richard III on the female line.

A portrait of King Richard III.

AP Photo/University of Leicester

"He has got a 96 percent probability that he had blue eyes - so a very high probability he had blue eyes - and a 77 percent probability of blond hair," she said. "This would have been childhood hair color. It can darken with age. But taking the genetic predictions, we would suggest the most closely matching portraits is the arch-framed portrait in the Society of Antiquaries of London [shown at left] because it has blue eyes and a lighter color of hair."

Other portraits, which depicted the king with dark eyes and dark hair, have been proved less accurate.

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DNA tests of bones reveals new details about King Richard III

Ancient bones discovered under a parking lot have been confirmed as those of the medieval king Richard III, through a DNA test that also raises questions about the legitimacy of Henry VIII and other famous English royals.

The team of genetics detectives reported Tuesday that DNA from the skeleton shows that the bones were Richard III's, with a likelihood of 99.9994 percent. This is the first genetic identification of a particular individual so long after death527 years.

Archaeologists had peeled back a parking lot in 2012 to excavate the skeleton, which was among buried relics of the Greyfriars Friary in Leicester, England, long the reputed burial site of Richard III. (See "The Real Richard III.")

Most people know the hunched-shouldered king through Shakespeare's play Richard III, in which the maligned ruler utters such memorable lines as "Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this son of York," and "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!"

Earlier this year, a forensic study of the remains revealed that the doomed kingthe last English monarch to die in combatsuffered 11 wounds at the time of his death, in a 1485 battle with the Tudors that ended England's War of the Roses

But there had been lingering questions about whether the skeleton was really that of Richard III.

"The evidence directly indicates that these are the remains of Richard III," says geneticist Turi King of the University of Leicester in the U.K., who led the team reporting the results in the journal Nature Communications. (Related: "Richard III Mania: Understanding a Kingly Obsession.")

The scientists examined DNA inherited along maternal lines, known as mitochondrial DNA, from two distantly related modern-day relatives of Richard III's sister. That DNA is a near perfect match for the maternal genes of the hunchbacked skeleton buried at the friary. What's more, the DNA was "unusual," King adds, containing stretches that don't quite match anything in registries of European genes.

A statistical analysis led by David Balding and Mark Thomas of University College London took those genetic results and calculated the chances that a man of Richard III's age with battle wounds and a curved spine could turn up at Greyfriars and not be the slain king. They conservatively estimated that chance at 6.7 million to 1.

"It is surprising how many people initially argued that these skeletal remains weren't those of Richard III," says bioanthropologist Piers Mitchell of the U.K.'s University of Cambridge, who was not part of the study team. "Well, here it is."

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DNA Confirms: Here Lieth Richard III, Under Yon Parking Lot