DNA fingerprinting uses microsatellites to identify individuals for paternity, criminal investigations, and victim identification. It has a high success rate and can be done with any part of the body. However, it can only establish a probability and has legal issues.
DNA fingerprinting is a way of identifying a specific individual, rather than simply identifying a species or some particular trait. It is also known as genetic fingerprinting or DNA profiling. As a technology, it has been around since at least 1985, when it was heralded by its inventor, Sir Alec Jeffreys. DNA fingerprinting is currently used both to identify paternity or maternity, and to identify criminals or victims. The use of DNA fingerprinting as a sort of personal identifier is also debated, although the feasibility of this is debatable.
The vast majority of a human’s DNA will exactly match that of any other human, making it quite difficult to distinguish between two people. DNA fingerprinting uses a specific type of DNA sequence, known as a microsatellite, to make identification much easier. Microsatellites are short fragments of DNA that repeat themselves many times in a given person’s DNA. In a given area, microsatellites tend to be highly variable, making them ideal for DNA fingerprinting. By comparing a number of microsatellites in a given area, a person can be identified relatively easily.
The sections of DNA used in DNA fingerprinting, although highly variable, are passed on from parents to children. While not all sections will necessarily air, no child has pairs that the parents don’t have. This means that by comparing large groups of these sections, paternity, maternity, or even both can be determined. DNA fingerprinting has a high success rate and a very low false positive rate, making it an extremely popular form of paternity and maternity verification.
In forensics, DNA fingerprinting is very attractive because it doesn’t require actual fingerprints, which may or may not be left behind, and may or may not be obscured. Since all sections of DNA are contained in every cell, any part of a person’s body, from a strand of hair to a skin follicle to a drop of blood, can be used to identify them using the DNA fingerprint. This is useful when identifying a criminal, because even a drop of blood or skin left at a crime scene can be enough to establish innocence or guilt, and it is practically impossible to remove any physical trace of one’s presence. DNA fingerprinting is useful in the case of victim identification because even in cases where the body may be disfigured after identification and the teeth or other identifying features destroyed, all that is needed is a single cell for DNA fingerprinting. positive identification.
The DNA fingerprint is by no means perfect, however. It cannot establish without a shadow of a doubt that a particular cell comes from a particular person; it can only establish a probability. In many cases this probability is very high, such as one in ten billion, but in some cases it can be much lower. The probability also obscures when dealing with direct descendants, who can share a large part of the DNA areas examined with a parent.
Despite these problems, DNA fingerprinting is becoming increasingly popular in the world of criminal science. While there are some legal issues, such as the conclusiveness of DNA fingerprinting and the extent to which it is legal for national laws to compile databases of people’s DNA and take samples of their DNA for comparison, the benefits currently seem to outweigh the problems.
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