Police Can Identify Suspect's Eye Colour from DNA
By New Scientist,
New Scientist
| 12. 13. 2011
Police with no leads can now predict the eye colour of their suspect from DNA recovered at the crime scene. It's the first time such a tool has been available.
Manfred Kayser at Erasmus University Medical Centre in the Netherlands and colleagues have developed IrisPlex, which can predict with 94 per cent accuracy whether a person has blue or brown eyes from a sample of DNA.
The Dutch Ministry of Security and Justice is expected to approve the kit in the coming weeks, while the UK could use it immediately.
It is the first validated tool to help police home in on a possible suspect by predicting a visible trait, says Kayser. This could be useful in cases where police have DNA from a crime scene, but can't find a match on a DNA database. It is not accurate enough to secure convictions in court, however.
IrisPlex examines six single-letter variations in DNA, known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which have been strongly linked to eye colour, and categorises them as blue, brown or "undefined" - an intermediate...
Related Articles
By Megan Molteni and Anil Oza, STAT | 10.07.2025
For two years, a panel of scientific experts, clinicians, and patient advocates had been hammering out ways to increase community engagement in National Institutes of Health-funded science. When they presented their road map to the NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya last...
By Pam Belluck, The New York Times | 10.17.2025
Before dawn on a March morning, Doug Whitney walked into a medical center 2,000 miles from home, about to transform from a mild-mannered, bespectacled retiree into a superhuman research subject.
First, a doctor inserted a needle into his back to...
By Julia Black, MIT Technology Review | 10.16.2025
Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of...
By Deni Ellis Béchard, The Washington Post | 10.07.2025
In 1949, when John Gurdon was a 16-year-old boarding school student at Eton College in England, his teacher described his biology studies as “disastrous” and his scientific ambitions as “ridiculous.”
“If he can’t learn simple biological facts,” his term report...
