The method could be utilised to identify disaster victims in mass floods and tornadoes that destroy entire communities.
A new technique that uses a simple cotton swab sample to accurately confirm relatedness between two individuals as distant as second cousins has been developed by the researchers at Kyoto University. With more DNA datasets at hand, the //method, described in the journal PLOS ONE, could be utilised to identify disaster victims in mass floods and tornadoes that destroy entire communities.
‘The new method compares how each individual SNP matches and how many consecutive matches there are, to confirm relatedness between distant relatives.’
"Up till now, the accuracy of verifying pairwise blood relations between parents and children were 95 percent and siblings around 72 percent. With slightly more distant relatives like aunts and uncles it goes down to five percent. As for cousins and second cousins, it was practically impossible," said one of the study authors Keiji Tamaki. "This new technique brings all of this to nearly 100 percent," Tamaki said.
The researchers explained that all it takes for the new method to work is a dab inside the cheek with a cotton swab. From these samples it is possible to compare 170 thousand single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP), which are locations where the genetic code varies minutely from person to person.
Instead of simply comparing how each individual SNP matches, they examined how many consecutive matches there were to confirm relatedness between distant relatives.
"This approach greatly improves pairwise kinship analysis of distant relationships, specifically in cases involving identification of disaster victims or missing persons," the study said.
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"Many tsunami victims passed away, and over 70 of them have yet to be identified even though five years have passed," Morimoto noted.
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Source-IANS