It is easy for a specialist to falsify the results of DNA tests, geneticist and head of the MIPT genome engineering laboratory Pavel Volchkov told socialbites.ca.
Formerly famous forensic scientist in the United States accused Forging DNA tests of suspects. Yvonne Missy Woods, who worked for the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI) for nearly three decades, manipulated DNA data in hundreds of studies.
“There are places in the genome that vary in length for each person. Even one such place can distinguish one person from another. But they are used for 25 loci. People are identified based on data on the coverage of these loci. This technology is quite old, routinely used and cheap.” explained Volchkov.
However, according to Volchkov, it is quite easy to falsify test results if DNA test samples are “contaminated”.
“Let’s say a person wants a particular suspect to be considered guilty. In this case, he needs a biological sample. It performs amplification (increasing the DNA copy number), which gives the length of the loci. “And if these fragments are added to the examined samples in large quantities, the expert will get the DNA of exactly the person he wants to find,” he said.
At the same time, as the expert notes, such “contamination” will go unnoticed due to the mixing of human DNA with another human sample.
The geneticist concluded: “If you have one sample that is several times larger than the other, then you cannot see the second one.”
According to Pavel Volchkov, modern science uses much more accurate methods to identify a person, up to full genome sequencing, which eliminates the possibility of such fraud.
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