Is Your Hair as Unique as a Fingerprint? This Team Says Yes

A test of human hair being developed by scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories could be used identify the hair’s owner in cases where DNA evidence is fragmented, damaged, or absent, the researchers claim. Like DNA sequencing, the test could also be used to trace ancestry.

Archaeologists, law enforcement and, one would assume, some accused suspects, are set to benefit from the developments.

The discovery, reported in the journal PLoS One, is set to offer a reliable alternative to DNA identification, which presently is notoriously vulnerable to decay and exposure to the environment. Thus, extracting a complete sequence from an aged, frozen or baked biological sample is rare.

Hair does not actually contain the nuclear DNA inherited from both parents, and the mitochondrial DNA it does contain has shortfalls as a means of identification.

In current forensic science, an apparent microscope match could not be accepted as evidence that the hair came from the one individual.

However, hair is made up of proteins and, according to Brad Hart, co-author of a paper and director Livermore’s Forensic Science Center, as well as being more resilient to environmental damage than DNA, those proteins resemble an echo of a person’s DNA.

Potentially a routine procedure for use in crime labs

Conceived in 2013 by the paper’s lead author, Glendon Parker, one-time professor of biochemistry at Utah Valley University, it’s an ingenious idea, as DNA provides the blueprint for proteins.

Coding quirks found in an individual’s DNA (called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs) translate into recognizable variants in the proteins. These are known as SAPS, or single amino acid polymorphisms. Protein markers, the SAPS, could help forensic scientists of the future to identify a person, even in the absence of DNA.

The authors of the report announced that as many as 1,000 protein markers could be used to identify individuals, but the plan is to reduce those numbers to a hardcore 100 or less allowing experts to distinguish one individual from a global population of seven billion.

“The discovery phase has been quite complex,” said Deon Anex, one of the paper’s co-authors, “But once the technique is established, we believe it can be made into a routine procedure for use in crime labs. We really see our job as providing tools for the forensic toolkit.”

Methodologies considered to be subjective should not always be relied upon said Hart, adding that using hair proteins in this manner described is a clever way to add missing pieces to a puzzle when DNA evidence is insufficient.

—–

Image credit: Thinkstock

The post Is your hair as unique as a fingerprint? This team says yes. appeared first on Redorbit.

redOrbit.com

offers Science, Space, Technology, Health news, videos, images and reference information. For the latest science news, space news, technology news, health news visit redOrbit.com frequently. Learn something new every day.”