Police sketch created solely with DNA
There were no witnesses to the gruesome murder of a South Carolina mother and her 3-year-old daughter inside a busy apartment complex four years ago. But a new technology that can create an image of someone using DNA samples left at crime scenes might bring police closer to catching the killer.
Reston, Va.-based Parabon Nanolabs, with funding from the Department of Defense, has debuted a breakthrough type of analysis called DNA phenotyping which the company says can predict a person’s physical appearance from the tiniest DNA samples, like a speck of blood or strand of hair.
The DNA phenotyping service, commercially known as “Snapshot,” could put a face on millions of unsolved cases, including international ones, and generate investigative leads when the trail has gone cold.
“This is particularly useful when there are no witnesses, no hits in the DNA database and nothing to go on,” Dr. Ellen McRae Greytak, Parabon’s director of bioinformatics, told FoxNews.com.
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While several agencies are now using Snapshot to help solve cold cases, including international ones, the Columbia, S.C. Police Department is first in the nation to publicly release a digital image generated by the new DNA analysis.
