Monthly Archives: August 2017

7

Let friends in your social network know what you are reading about

When you gotta go, you gotta go.

Try Another

Audio CAPTCHA

Image CAPTCHA

Help

CancelSend

A link has been sent to your friend's email address.

A link has been posted to your Facebook feed.

This undated booking photo provided by the Ventura County Sheriff shows Andrew David Jensen, 42, of Ventura, Calif., who was arrested on July 28, 2017 on suspicion of committing a burglary.(Photo: Ventura County Sheriff via AP)

When you gotta go, you gotta go.

A California man accused of burglary left DNA evidence in the toilet of the home he robbed last October, Associated Press reported Tuesday.

Andrew David Jensen, 42, "did his business and didn't flush it,"Detective Tim Lohman of the Ventura County Sheriffs Office told the Associated Press.

When police initially responded to the break-in last year, they "were able to locate items that potentially contained the suspects DNA," according to a statement from the Ventura County Sheriff's Office. Forensic analysts were then able to match the samples from the scene with DNA already in their system.

Lohman told the Associated Press that this is the first case he knows of where fecal evidence collected from a toilet after a burglary had a successful DNA match.

"When people think of DNA evidence, they usually think of hair samples or saliva," Lohman told the Associated Press.

Jensen was arrested July 28 and remains in pre-trial custody, according to the police statement.

Contributing: Associated Press

Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2wGoa7r

Read the original post:
Police: Man left DNA in toilet during burglary - USA TODAY

The York Gospels were assembled more than a thousand years ago. Bound in leather, illustrated, and illuminated, the book contains the four gospels of the Bible as well as land records and oaths taken by clergymen who read, rubbed, and kissed its pages over centuries. The Archbishops of York still swear their oaths on this book.

The York Gospels are also, quite literally, a bunch of old cow and sheep skins. Skin has DNA, and DNA has its own story to tell.

A group of archaeologists and geneticists in the United Kingdom have now analyzed the remarkably rich DNA reservoir of the York Gospels. They found DNA from humans who swore oaths on its pages and from bacteria likely originating on the hands and mouths of those humans. Best of all though, they found 1,000-year-old DNA from the cows and sheep whose skin became the parchment on which the book is written.

Remarkably, the authors say they extracted all this DNA without destroying even a tiny piece of parchment. All they needed were the crumbs from rubbing the book with erasers, which conservationists routinely use to clean manuscripts. The authors report their findings in a preprint that has not yet been peer-reviewed, though they plan to submit it to a scientific journal.

If their technique works, it could revolutionize the use of parchment to study history. Every one of these books is a herd of animals. Using DNA, researchers might track how a disease changed the makeup of a herd or how the skin of sheep from one region moved to another medieval trade routes. Its part of a growing movement to bring together scholars in the sciences and humanities to study medieval manuscripts.

Scientists have extracted DNA from parchment before, but this non-destructive technique expands the potential pool of research material. Archivists are loathe to allow researchers to cut off a piece of, say, the York Gospels, but some eraser crumbs? Sure. Thats why its such an exciting breakthrough. It allows a lot of different manuscripts from a lot of different areas to be analyzed together, says Bruce Holsinger, an English professor at the University of Virginia who is writing a book about parchment.

The idea to study parchment came to Matthew Collins, an archaeologist at the University of York, after a failed study in bones. A few years ago, he had a graduate student trying to extract ancient DNA from animal bones at an old Viking settlement. There were thousands of bones on the site, but only six that they tested yielded DNAtoo few for any statistically significant results. You can imagine the frustration, says Collins.

So Collins got to thinking about archives full of old manuscripts. You look at these shelves, and every one of them has a skin of an animal with a date written on it, he says. Suddenly you have thousands of animals. And you didnt even need to go out into the field and dig. When Collins and postdoctoral researcher Sarah Fiddyment first approached archives to collaborate though, they made the mistake of thinking like archaeologists used to routinely pulverizing bone for DNA analysis. They told us we would not be allowed to sample the parchments. Matthew and I didnt think of it, says Fiddyment. She ended up shadowing conservationists for several weeks and learned about their eraser technique. White plastic erasers made by Staedtler turned out to be perfect for cleaning manuscripts and for collecting DNA.

Collins and Fiddyment had previously collaborated with Holsinger to use the eraser technique to study proteins from uterine vellumso named because it is so thin that people thought that they were made from the skin of unborn livestock. Others, however suggested the skin came from different animals entirely, like squirrel or rabbit. The team published a study in 2015 analyzing proteins rubbed off of uterine vellum. They found that uterine vellum is indeed from calves, sheep, and goats, though not necessarily unborn ones.

With the York Gospels, Collins and Fiddyment went one step further to look for DNA with the eraser technique. They analyzed eraser dust from eight pages. Three of the samples yielded enough DNA to compare to modern cattle genomes, and the single most complete parchment genome was similar to modern Norwegian reds and Holsteins.

They also looked at the sex of the calves. Four of the five whose sex they could determine from DNA were female, which they found highly unusual if representative. Females are more valuable if you want to grow your herds, so why would you kill so many females to make parchment? Collins and Fiddyment consulted with Annelise Binois-Roman, a zooarchaeologist, who noted that a cattle plague swept through England in the years before the York Gospels were created. Perhaps those dead calves were salvaged to make parchment. Another colleague who specialized in the Anglo-Saxon era suggested maybe precious female calves were deliberately used because it is such an important book.

The First Book of Selfies

Collins and Fiddyment recognize that scientists alone cant make sense of the DNA from parchment. They need historians and literary scholars and curators to interpret their findings. Since then, Collins has reached out to scholars and archivists far and wide to collect more DNA samples.

Timothy Stinson, an English professor at North Carolina State University, first wrote about studying DNA from parchment seven years ago. I felt like the voice in the wilderness, says Stinson. Thats changed now with the efforts of Collins and others. Stinson is interested in using DNA to study how the production of books changed over time. Early on, he says, manuscripts were likely made up of related animals from the same herd. But as cities like London and Paris grew, guilds sprung up to make books, bringing in parchment from all over.

Collins points out that medievalists studying copying errors in manuscripts have long used the same phylogenetic programs that evolutionary biologists use to study how DNA mutations appear over time. DNA analysis is simply a new way to read the hidden messages in parchment.

View original post here:
Sampling DNA From a 1000-Year-Old Illuminated Manuscript - The Atlantic

Why fentanyl is deadlier than heroin, in a single

Why fentanyl is deadlier than heroin, in a single photo

Allergan CEO looks smart for pledging to rein in

Allergan CEO looks smart for pledging to rein in prices. But will it make a difference?

The electrifying fitness technique that has doctors worried

The electrifying fitness technique that has doctors worried

Drug treatments didnt work. Can a simple diet help

Drug treatments didnt work. Can a simple diet help change these childrens lives?

After her own complicated delivery, lawmaker aims to address

After her own complicated delivery, lawmaker aims to address Texass alarming maternal death rate

White House rejects appeal to call national emergency over

White House rejects appeal to call national emergency over opioid epidemic

Go here to see the original:
How a 'Velcro' chip that traps alien DNA could improve prenatal testing - STAT

Alexa Renee, KXTV 5:43 PM. PDT August 08, 2017

Investigators say Robin Brooks found dead 37 years ago was sexually assaulted prior to being stabbed to death in her apartment. (Photo: Sacramento County Sheriff's Department)

The Sacramento County Sheriff's Department is taking a crack at a cold case using an advanced DNA technology.

On April 24, 1980, Robin Gisela Brooks, was found stabbed to death in the bedroom of her Rosemont apartment. The 20-year-old had been sexually assaulted prior to her death and investigators found DNA evidence of the suspect at the crime scene but have been unable to identify the killer.

Brooks was scheduled to work at Donut Time on Kiefer Boulevard on the day she was found dead, but never show up for her shift. That's when coworkers came looking for Brooks and made the tragic discovery. Brooks family has a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible for her murder.

Her family may get closer to getting answers because of the sheriff's department new efforts in finding the suspect. The department has a full DNA profile of the suspect but no matches have come up on any federal or state DNA database.

Sacramento County investigators are hoping DNAphenotypingcould paint a picture of who killed Brooks. The DNA service cost the department $4,000 and is charged per case, it's not a flat rate fee. It's the first time the sheriff's department has used DNA phenotypingto try and solve a case.

What is DNA phenotyping?

Phenotyping can also help identify relatives of a person through DNA connections.

The testing cannot determine factors such as age, weight and facial hair since those details are not available in a person's genetic code. Parabonpredicts a person at 25-years-old by default. Forensic artists would have to adjust age, facial hair and weight based on description information provided by police or eye witnesses.

DNA phenotyping helps illustrate what a person may look like when there are no leads on identification or when a DNA profile doesn't match anything in a database. The tool is especially helpful in case like the Brooks murder, where there were no eyewitnesses to the crime to describe a suspect, but traces of DNA were left behind.

The technology was created fordefense, security, justice, and intelligence communities and has been used by numerous agencies to help generate leads. Private citizens have used Snapshot to find ancestry information.

Has DNA phenotyping helped solve cases?

Phenotyping can be a great tool for eliminating suspects and sparking leads.

Police had previously believed the suspect was a Latino male because Bouzigard was last seen with a group of Latino men. However, the Parabonanalysis found the suspect to be a white male.

Parabon led the Rockingham County Sheriff's Office to Jose Alvarez Jr., the brother of couple's daughter's boyfriend at the time of the murder. He was arrested in Aug. 2015 and later pled guilty to two both murders. In July of 2016, he was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.

Phenotyping can also help with unidentified remains when there is no visual on what the person may have looked like.

What are the issues with DNAphenotyping?

Phenotypingrelies on identifying using physical appearance, which is a method that can run into some problems. Parabontechnology cannot positively create a photo ID of a person, it can only help create a visual when there are no other leads.

Also, a person can look like a sibling or relative, or even another completely unrelated person. There's no science available that can confirm a person's DNA through face structure.

The only way to identify someone using DNA phenotypingis if a person of interest is tested for DNA and it comes back as a match with the sample used to create the Parabonsketch. This means, there'd have to be a tip leading to that person. Unfortunately, the actual suspect may not look like the sketch and misleading tips may come in.

Another issue the ACLU touches on is social and racial profiling. When a sketch is that of a person of color it can fuel "existing societal prejudices to further increase the risks to innocent people". Also, police officers with less sophisticated science tools may rely too heavily on the images and pressure DNA tests from innocent people.

Phenotypingshould be used as more of a tool to narrow down or eliminate suspects, rather than as a point of probable cause to "create" a suspect.

In cold cases such as the killing of Brooks, phenotypingcan help jog memories of someone who may have seen something or knows anything about the suspect, since there is nothing else to go on to solve the case but the DNA profile of the suspect.

Below are the Snapshot DNA phenotyping results for the suspect in the Brooks case. Note physical appearance of subject may have changed over the years.

Snapshot prediction of suspect in 1980 murder of Rosemont woman, Robin Grisela Brooks. (Photo: Parabons NanoLabs Inc.)

Snapshot prediction of suspect in 1980 murder of Rosemont woman, Robin Grisela Brooks. (Photo: Parabons NanoLabs Inc.)

2017 KXTV-TV

Read more:
Sacramento County Sheriff's Department using new DNA technology for cold case - ABC10