Authors
Kangana Agrawal
Abstract
In today’s present scenario, the forensic investigator faces immense challenges and difficulties to apprehend the perpetrator due to lack of evidence or eyewitnesses. To convict the criminals, the most conclusive evidence is considered to be biological (DNA) evidence. Since criminals have advanced their methods to commit the crime, forensic investigators should also adapt or look for modern techniques to help the court of law to serve justice. One of those modern and most recent techniques is Forensic DNA Phenotyping (FDP). It predicts the external traits of unknown or missing individuals directly from the biological evidence discovered at the scene of crime. FDP can help in providing the lead to the forensic investigator to uncover unidentifiable persons. This application of DNA will be used in forensic casework in a completely different manner from the comparative current DNA profiling which is presently used in the court of law. Presently, no such technique exists which can predict individual-specific appearance accurately. Forensic DNA Phenotyping uses SNPs to determine the phenotype of the individual. It can help in estimating the externally visible characteristics (EVCs) such as hair color, iris color, height, gender, skin tone, and others. Therefore, it develops the biological blueprint of physical traits. This technique can have a great impact in the future and can replace the traditional techniques if provided sufficient funding for research purposes, to develop based on genetically appearance of humans. This will significantly lead to a vast and detailed description of an unidentified person’s appearance from DNA, delivering increased value for police investigations in criminal and missing/deceased person cases involving unknowns.Keywords: Crime, DNA, Forensic DNA Phenotyping, Evidence, EVCs
Introduction
There are abundant genetic variations in the different populations of the world. These variations make up the genome of the individual unique. From the past many decades we are well equipped with the technology and methodology to study these genetic variations. Some of these DNA profiling techniques included are DNA fingerprinting, DNA sequencing techniques, microarray technology, and so on.
As the technology is developing fast in these modern times, there is a need to modify or replace traditional techniques and methods so that it can give more accurate results and is much sensitive than before. One of the advanced technology which has been discovered by scientists is of DNA phenotyping. It can determine the phenotype through the genotype of the individual by using SNP data collected from Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) (Zhang et al., 2014). DNA phenotyping technique is more precise and accurate than the previous techniques. It can confirm the gender from the evidence with 100 percent accuracy. It has also 70 percent accuracy in estimating externally visible characteristics (EVCs) like the color of eye, pigmentation in skin and hair, height, and so on.
This technique can have a significant application in forensic science as it will become easy for the investigators to determine the physical features of the culprit without depending upon the known samples. As this technique continues to develop we can determine face shape, the structure of hair, male pattern baldness, an individual’s fingerprint patterns, cleft chin, freckles on the skin, skin tone, ethnicity, age, underlying diseases and others (MacLean and Lamparello, 2014).
The FDP (Forensic DNA Phenotyping) can be a useful tool for law enforcement agencies as it is more reliable and more predictive and can help in the exclusion or inclusion of suspects based on the data of this technique which includes the face morphology and external characteristics. Hence, it can be often considered superior to eyewitness testimony, which can be used in the conviction of the wrong person.
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| APA Style | Aggarwal, K. (2020). Forensic DNA Phenotyping: Significance in Criminal Investigations. Academic Journal of Forensic Sciences, 3 (1), 20–15. |
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