We can ID people from DNA that shows up in environmental studies

News Summary

  • He and his colleagues realized that having human DNA slip into research samples might be an issue, so they looked to see if they could find any in old water and sand samples they had taken as part of a wildlife and pathogen monitoring study.
  • It could be used to add genetic information from underrepresented populations to genomic databases that still lack them or to find undiscovered sites of human habitation that archeologists have not yet uncovered.
  • Then they went intentionally searching for specific human sequences, and, in water, sand, and air samples, they found plenty of genomic regions that could identify a person’s ancestry and susceptibility to several diseases.
  • Now that identifiable human DNA can be isolated from air, these issues really need to get hammered out.But the DNA that we are constantly shedding and leaving all around us could also be used for good.
  • In the US and the European Union, federally funded researchers intending to work with identifiable human DNA samples must first get approval from their institutional review board (which Whitmore did) and also get written informed consent from participants.
  • Human genomic bycatch could be used to continually monitor for cancer-causing mutations, which arise and accumulate over a person’s lifetime.
Enlarge/ People may accidentally sequence your DNA while trying to study something else entirely.9 with It used to be that if you wanted to find a DNA sequence in a particular sample, you had to [+5054 chars]