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Crime and DNA testing

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Crimes and DNA
In an incident where a man rapes a woman and get away without being identified, police ask local men to submit a DNA sample (by of which is then placed in the Nat'l Database). Most men in the town voluntarily submit a sample, and none of them matched the sample collected at the crime scene, but a partial match was found. Authorities then looked at immediate relatives of the close match and identified a suspect.

-What is the fundamental science of this scenario?

- What practices may have been used to conduct this investigation?

-What genetics may have triggered this close call of a match; how would this examination be different from a direct identification.

-What is some societal implication of the way the investigation was conducted? (Negative and positive factors)

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In an incident where a man rapes a woman and get away without being identified, police ask local men to submit a DNA sample (by of which is then placed in the Nat'l Database). Most men in the town voluntarily submit a sample, and none of them matched the sample collected at the crime scene, but a partial match was found. Authorities then looked at immediate relatives of the close match and identified a suspect.

-What is the fundamental science of this scenario?
Identification of suspects based on genetic testing is based on identifying a series of rare genetic elements. In some cases this is a particular pattern formed by restriction enzyme fragments (RFLPs), variable lengths of repetitive DNA (variable length polymorphisms), or a single nucleotide differences (single nucleotide polymorphisms). Whatever the DNA identifier it has to be rare enough to preclude matches due to random chance. The crime DNA sample can then ...

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