My Biotech Life

Ok, I might have gone a little overboard with the title of this post but let me explain what this is all about.

The Forensic Science Service of Birmingham (UK) has come up with an intriguing new way to catch sex offenders.

Catching rapist through DNA fingerprinting is usually very difficult due to the fact that swabs taken from the victims produce results that are inconclusive. The DNA profile of the victim completely swamps that of any DNA found from the rapist. Even if they amplified the DNA profiles, they would just end up with more of the same undistinguishable DNA, because both DNA profiles would be amplified.

So, the very intelligent people over at the Forensic Science Service thought about a better way to get around this and they came up with a mixed technique that uses fluorescent tagging of chromosomes where X would glow red and Y would be green, thus making it visibly possible to pick out the male cells for analysis. Genius, right?

The details behind the technique used by the FSS can be found here (New Scientist).

Oh, and now you ask me… why spermless rapists? Well, it seems that more than 10% of rapes are done by guys that have had a vasectomy done already, so that means no sperm. But not to worry, semen has more than just sperm, and those other cells also have DNA for fingerprinting!

And the best news is that this new technique has already caught a bad guy or two. Good show!

I found one thing a little odd in this technique that couldn’t have seriously been overlooked… I’ll bet all my change in my pocket (about 0.85 euro) that there are almost as many male/male rapes as there are male/female.

So how are they [FSS] going to distinguish the rapist’s DNA from the male victim’s if they both have Y chromosomes?

[Photo by: selyfriday]

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