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DNA Not The Same In Every Cell Of Body: Major Genetic Differences Between Blood And Tissue Cells Revealed

inothernews:

lawful:

(via particlesoftruth)

Wow.

Regular old me: Fascinating!

Law talking me: It’s as if thousands of prosecutors suddenly cried out…

I’m sort of surprised that more news organizations haven’t picked up on this. Is Science Daily a peer-reviewed journal?

Hrm.

The paper being referenced by ScienceDaily appeared in Human Mutation, although they did a really crappy job of pointing to the paper itself.

I took a look at the paper, and the result certainly is interesting, but I think a lot more work needs to be done before I’d consider this to be a regular occurrence. For one, the authors are not terribly specific about how many of the normal samples showed the mutations. They only had 5 samples, but did they observe the mutations in all five? Did they see one mutation in one sample and the other in another sample? Did they find both mutations in one sample and the remaining 4 were normal?

Seeing even one of the normal samples having the mutation in aortic tissue and not blood would be an interesting finding, but without some more context (and a lot more study) it’s tough to say how wide-spread this phenomenon is and what it’s real implications for genetic association studies are.

As to Forensic DNA identification, I don’t see this impacting it at all. DNA identification is done by looking at a number of regions throughout the genome that are highly variable from person to person, and which are outside of genes. The FBI’s panel that gets put into CODIS (the big criminal database) is made up of 13 different DNA regions that are repeated a different number of times between individuals. This paper talks about single base-pair changes within genes, which are not what are used for DNA identification.

Also, if samples were taken from the same source as the evidence then it would completely negate this problem, so if defense attorneys start using this article for that then maybe prosecutors and criminologists will start doing that as a matter of course.

(Although I guess I could be overestimating the intelligence of juries here - someone pre-disposed to doubt scientific evidence might find this convincing, but there’s nothing in this paper as it stands that would have implications for DNA identification.)

Source: particlesoftruth