Marcus Butler and Amanda Jones
25 July 2016: In an Australian first, police will soon be able to test the ancestry of DNA found at crime scenes thanks to new technology to be based at the University of Canberra.
The University has received $75,000 in seed funding from the Discovery Translation Fund 2.0 for its Genetic Ancestry Laboratory project.
Lead researcher and associate professor of forensic genetics at the University of Canberra Dennis McNevin said the project will help police identify the ancestry of suspects.
"Traditionally, the use of DNA in forensics has been limited to matching a DNA profile from crime scene evidence with a suspect," Dr McNevin said.
"But what happens if there are no suspects, or a very large pool of suspects? Normally, this would mean a dead end for police investigators, but it may soon be possible to provide a molecular photo-fit or a sketch of the DNA donor.
"The Genetic Ancestry Laboratory, which will be based at UC, uses new DNA sequencing technology and computer algorithms which speed up the process," he added.
The technology means Dr McNevin and his colleagues can uncover more information from crime-scene DNA, such as the donor's genetic ancestry, with hair colour, eye colour and other traits to follow.
Overseas services, specifically those in the United States of America, already offer genetic analysis services to determine people's lineage, but Dr McNevin said they often analyse a much larger portion of the person's genetic code.
"We are targeting a specific set of differences which we can directly link to continental regions where a person's ancestors originated, that's more like scanning that novel for a few key words and knowing what it means when we find them.
"This smaller subset of differences, called single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs, is much quicker to sequence, identify and interpret," he said.
The Genetic Ancestry Laboratory will begin trials of the system later this year, with the service offered to police from 2017.
