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Sunday, March 23, 2014

DNA WILL CREATE 3-D PHOTO

I'M WONDERING ABOUT HOW THEY WILL BE ABLE TO DISTINGUISH ONE FAMILY MEMBER OF THE SAME SEX FROM ANOTHER, AS IN, PERHAPS, IDENTICAL TWINS, OR COUSINS, LET US SAY, WHO VERY CLOSELY RESEMBLE ONE ANOTHER. 
IT ALL SEEMS A FAR REACH TO ME, BUT WHO CAN SAY FOR SURE IF THIS WILL BE A BLESSING OR A CURSE....GUESS IT WILL DEPEND ON LONG-TERM PERFECTING OF SUCH A THING AND THE HONESTY AND INTEGRITY OF THE ENTIRE JUDICIAL SYSTEM.. 

THAT "LAW ENFORCEMENT" MIGHT EVER HAVE ANY ACCESS AT ALL TO MY DNA WOULD GREATLY TROUBLE ME.
AS I HAVE WRITTEN HERE BEFORE, IT IS NOW COMMON FOR POLICE TO COLLECT DNA FROM US DURING EVEN A MINOR TRAFFIC STOP.
IF THEY WANT OUR DNA, THE COURTS HAVE MADE IT HANDILY AVAILABLE TO THEM.

MAYBE I KNOW TOO MANY PEOPLE IN "LAW ENFORCEMENT" AND IN THE JUDICIAL BRANCH OF OUR GOVERNMENT...BUT IT IS DISCONCERTING TO ME TO CONSIDER HOW THIS CAN BE SERIOUSLY ABUSED BY UNSCRUPULOUS PEOPLE..
WHAT IF AN "OFFICER" DECIDED TO PLANT  DNA AT A CRIME SCENE LIKE WE'VE READ ABOUT A FEW DOING WITH PHYSICAL EVIDENCE IN THE PAST?

FROM 'SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN', Mar 22, 2014
Leaving a hair at a crime scene could one day be as damning as leaving a photograph of your face. Researchers have developed a computer program that can create a crude three-dimensional (3D) model of a face from a DNA sample.
Kun Tang, a biologist at the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences in China, says that facial reconstruction is turning out to be much more difficult than predicting, say, skin pigmentation. “One thing we’re certain of: there's no single gene that suddenly makes your nose big or small,” he says. The task is complicated further, he adds, by environmental factors, such as exposure to specific climates, which is hypothesized to influence the structure of faces.
Tang’s group has also been looking for genes associated with individual facial features, using an even more detailed scan that produces 30,000 data points per face. In a paper published in December 2013, Tang and his colleagues reported taking similar high-resolution 3D images of 1,001 Han Chinese, and trying to connect the faces to their genomes. The researchers found five SNPs — different ones from those identified by Shriver’s group — that were significantly correlated with several facial features. For instance, one gene known to be involved in causing cleft palate strongly predicted lip shape in Han Chinese women. Tang says the group is now in the process of adding thousands more people of different ethnicities from around the country to see whether there are regional differences in facial structure.

HERE'S HOW THEY PLAN TO ACCOMPLISH THIS...
Genetic 'Mugshot' Could Help Researchers Solve Crimes, Peer Into History
Mar 22, 2014

Researchers could create a "mugshot" of an individual by analyzing DNA left behind at a crime scene.

"By jointly modeling sex, genomic ancestry and genotype, the independent effects of particular alleles on facial features can be uncovered," the researchers said, a Penn State news release reported. "By simultaneously modeling facial shape variation as a function of sex and genomic ancestry along with genetic markers in cranio-facial candidate genes, the effects of sex and ancestry can be removed from the model thereby providing the ability to extract the effects of individual genes."

Researchers included "sex and racial admixture" into their analyzation to learn how genes influence the facial features.

"We use DNA to match to an individual or identify an individual, but you can get so much more from DNA," Mark D. Shriver, professor of anthropology at Penn State, said in the news release. "Currently we can't go from DNA to a face or from a face to DNA, but it should be possible."

"The environment and social environment are major driving factors in changing a whole set of genes that make up how a person looks," Peter Claes, postdoctoral researcher, research expert in morphometrics, Medical Imaging Research Center, KU Leuven, Belgium and first author on the paper, said in the news release. 

  In the not-too-distant future, it may be possible to create a digital mugshot from DNA. Researchers from Pennsylvania State University, led by anthropologist Mark Shriver, published a study this week on their attempts to understand how our genetic code influences our facial structure. That research, say the authors of the study, will one day make it possible to predict criminals’ appearances based only on, say, a strand of hair left at a crime scene.

Although things like sex, skin tone, and eye and hair colors are relatively easy to predict from DNA, facial structures have always been more of a mystery. Faces are complicated, and how one part is shaped can strongly influence other parts of the face. To tackle such a complex project, the researchers took pictures of 532 people of mixed European and West African ancestry from three different regions. They then made 3D images of those faces, overlaying each of them with 7,000 data points to determine variation among faces.

In the end, the scientists found 24 SNPs on 20 different genes, all of which control facial structure to some extent. Of course, a person’s entire appearance isn’t solely dictated by his or her DNA, and current methods for testing DNA are by no means falling by the wayside. “Human facial diversity is substantial, complex, and largely scientifically unexplained,” write the researchers in the study’s abstract, published in PLOS Genetics.

Still, their predictive model can already create a crude facial model based only on genetic code, and the project’s usefulness for detectives is already being tested. Shriver is already working with police to find a serial rapist in Pennsylvania.

"SCIENCE MARCHES ON"? 
OR THE RISE OF ABSOLUTE CONTROL OF THE POPULACE?
YOU DECIDE...

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