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A new crime scene technology aims to recreate the suspect's face from a single hair.
Anthony Carboni here for DNews, and new software out of Pennsylvania State University might
be able to construct a mugshot of a suspect from a single hair left at a crime scene.
DNA evidence is already used in a lot of crime scene investigations- it's currently most
useful in terms of matching whether someone who is already a suspect to evidence at the
scene or in proving the innocence of someone accused. It's basically a lock and key situation-
if you have a person and a result, you can plug the DNA in to draw a line between them.
It's not yet used in terms of trying to find out what the suspect looks like- there are
about 20 to 25,000 different coding genes in the human genome, and we're still not sure
what they all do, so getting a clear picture of a suspect from DNA isn't entirely possible
yet.
The experimental technique tries not to worry about what we don't know and instead uses
a database of volunteers and their genes to make software that can give investigators
an approximation of their suspect. The team grabbed facial images and DNA from 600 people
of mixed ancestry living in the US. They used software to compare 7000 different points
on their faces- two points on someone's nose might be flatter- 20 might make their cheekbones
more pronounced.
Then they took the genes of those people and looked at about 20 genes that we know are
associated with facial shape and found common genes that volunteers with similar features
shared. Using that information, the team created software that'll analyze a DNA sample and
then construct a possible suspect's face based on their genetic similarities to the volunteers.
It sounds awesome, though if I had to give one criticism of the system right now, it
would be that everyone comes out looking like those nightmare baby masks from The Purge.
Researchers admit that the technology isn't quite there- there's not a single gene that
makes your nose big or small. It's easier to say whether someone is tall or short, or
figure out what their hair color is, than it is to figure out something as complex as
facial shape.
And even when we do map more genes and figure out how to make software like this more accurate,
it'll still have the same issues as any DNA evidence collected now- DNA samples can be
incomplete, contaminated, mixed. It's a great tool, but it needs to be backed with other
evidence.
Even still, this seems like a pretty crazy first step towards something that'll probably
be a huge investigative tool in the future.
If you have any feelings about DNA and crimes, or about those baby masks from The Purge,
I've got a lot of feelings about those, you can tweet at me. I'm @acarboni and be sure
to subscribe here for more DNews.