Please see our “Did You Know?” section toward the end of this issue.
Topic: Researchers conduct first molecular simulation of a long DNA strand
For events and conferences please go to the end of the newsletter. If there are any events you would like for us to mention, please send me the name and dates with a website link for further details. Latest posting: 18th International Symposium on Human Identification.
As part of recent news stories, the count of prisoners freed after DNA tests proved their innocence is up to 188, according to the Innocence Project in New York.
And in addition to the continued use of DNA evidence to convict the guilty and free the innocent, it is also increasingly used for a number of different purposes: one of these being the ability to reunite missing and orphaned children with their families. A recent example involves “children displaced during the war in El Salvador. A Berkeley DNA project has made the reunion possible.”
Following these stories we are including a number of new and ongoing cases involving the use of DNA evidence.
DNA tests have freed 188 prisoners
Dewayne Scott Cunningham, convicted in 1996 of raping a woman at a Flomaton park, said all of those people being exonerated gives him hope that he will become the 189th and win release from his life sentence.
Two of the 188 prisoners who have been freed came from Alabama. Prosecutors in that case dismissed charges and released brothers Ronnie Mahan and Dale Mahan in 1998, after they had served more than 12 years in prison for a 1983 rape and kidnapping. Cunningham, who has served 11 years so far, said he knew one of the Mahans -- he can't remember which one -- when he was incarcerated with him at Bullock Correctional Facility in Union Springs.
A young woman in the Mahan case was abducted from a shopping mall and taken to a wooded area, where she was forced to use drugs and was raped several times, according to the Innocence Project in New York City.
The victim later identified the brothers from a photo lineup.
If Cunningham is to win his freedom, the 37-year-old native Californian will have to do so by way of federal court, because Alabama is one of nine states that did not accept federal financial incentives to pass a law allowing for automatic post-conviction DNA tests. His civil rights lawsuit is pending in federal court in Mobile.
Officials from the Innocence Project, which is affiliated with Yeshiva University's Benjamin Cardozo Law School, said they recognize that victims and states have an interest in closure. But they said that should not trump the ability of wrongfully convicted people to prove their innocence.
"I think if there is biological evidence that can be tested, there is the potential to provide a real answer," said Stephen Saloom, the organization's policy director. "If the evidence exists and you refuse to test it, there's a lingering question about that person's innocence."
Saloom said the victim's mistaken identification in the Mahan case is hardly an exception. Eyewitness misidentification is responsible for about three-fourths of wrongful convictions that DNA testing has overturned, he said.
"People's memories aren't as strong as was once assumed," he said.
A law review article highlighting a Pennsylvania rape case makes the same point. The evidence in that case appeared even stronger than the evidence that convicted Cunningham.
According to the law review article by a pair of University of Pennsylvania professors, Bruce Godschalk confessed to a pair of 1986 rapes in Montgomery County, a wealthy Philadelphia suburb. Police reported that the suspect provided details that only investigators, the victim and the perpetrator could know.
In addition, one of the victims identified Godschalk as her rapist, semen recovered from one of the attacks came from the same blood type as the defendant and a fellow jail inmate testified that the defendant admitted the crimes while awaiting trial.
Although Godschalk recanted his confession and claimed police provided him with the details, a jury found him guilty and a judge sentenced him in 1987 to 10 to 20 years in prison.
Like Alabama now, Pennsylvania at the time had no laws guaranteeing convicts a right to post-conviction DNA testing. And like the Flomaton rape, authorities resisted conducting the test on the grounds that the evidence against Godschalk was overwhelming.
After a state court judge denied a request for a DNA test, Godschalk in 2000 filed a civil rights lawsuit in federal court -- the same type of suit Cunningham has filed.
During litigation, the state and Godschalk's attorneys worked out an agreement to run the DNA tests. Those tests indicated that one man committed both rapes but that he certainly was not Godschalk. Authorities dismissed the charges and freed Godschalk in February 2002, after he had served 15 years in prison.
Source: http://www.dnalabsinternational.com/email_newsletter/vol_34_jan_07/vol34_ref01.html
DNA Helps Orphans Reunite With Families
Has Matched 300 Missing Children
A young woman is home tonight after being reunited with the family she lost when she was a baby. She was one of thousands of children displaced during the war in El Salvador. A Berkeley DNA project has made the reunion possible.
Jerry Fillingim holds on to the daughter he adopted as an infant 21-years ago. She just returned from El Salvador where she met her birth mother, and other family for the first time.
Angela Fillingim, Adopted: "It's been very surreal. I think just to be there, and meet everyone all at the same time, and trying to figure out everyone's name, and just to meet. I think the main thing is just meeting a family, that's your family, you just don't really know, and trying to figure out where to go from there."
Angela's mother gave her up for adoption when families were being killed and children were abducted in the midst of the violent civil war. She said her mother apologized for giving her up. But no apology was necessary.
Angela Fillingim: "I've just had like a lot of opportunities, and for me I thanked her for making the best decision she could given the circumstances, and for continuing to be really strong."
U.C. Berkeley's Human Rights Center has partnered with the State Department of Justice, and the organization Pro-Busqueda in El Salvador to create a DNA database to reunite children and families. Forensic mathematician Charles Brenner said the technology is similar to that used to identify bodies at disaster scenes.
Charles Brenner, Ph. D., Forensic Mathematician: "Identifying, mathematically speaking, identifying adoptees who have lost track of their families is the same probably as identifying corpses - except it's a little more cheerful."
Right now there are about 800 DNA profiles in a database waiting to be matched with missing children, but the experts say there could be as many as 14,000 such children worldwide.
Eric Stover, Human Rights Center: "We now need to go out, and find the children who've been adopted in various countries around the world."
Jerry Fillingim: "You never know what you're going to find in a family in this kind of relationship, but I think it's better to know."
So far the DNA project has matched more than 300 missing children with families looking for them.
Eric Stover, Human Rights Center: "There's no stronger human force on earth than a family than a mother or father looking for their missing child."
The next step is to expand the DNA database to reunite more families.
Source: http://www.dnalabsinternational.com/email_newsletter/vol_34_jan_07/vol34_ref02.html
New and ongoing cases involving the use of DNA evidence include:
California - A man in prison on a parole violation was charged Thursday with kidnapping and sexually assaulting another man in August 2004 after a DNA "cold hit" linked him to the attack, police said.
A second suspect in the case is still being sought.
Charged with several sex crimes and a penalty enhancement clause because the crimes occurred during a kidnapping was Marquez Briggs, 23, who used to live in Oakland and is currently at Corcoran State Prison.
DNA evidence was recovered from the victim, and Oakland police criminalists sent it to a state lab. The DNA was put into the Combined DNA Index System, but no matches were found at the time.
A few months later Briggs was arrested and convicted in the Central Valley for a sex crime. As a convicted felon who did not have a DNA sample on file, he was required to submit one before his release from prison as mandated by Proposition 69, which passed in 2004.
That sample was sent to the state lab, which matched it to the DNA evidence obtained from the Oakland sexual assault victim.
Grant said police are still trying to identify the second suspect in the Oakland assault, and up to $5,000 in reward money is available. Anyone with information can contact him at 238-3426 or Crime Stoppers of Oakland at 238-6946.
Source: http://www.dnalabsinternational.com/email_newsletter/vol_34_jan_07/vol34_ref03.html
Arizona - A Tucson man who shot and killed another man outside the Bum Steer just months after being released from prison was ordered back to prison for 20 years Thursday.
Vernon Bullock Jr., 29, expressed sorrow over Francisco Arriaga's death, but he also rejected the testimony of a ballistic expert who tied his gun to the crime.
Arriaga, 25, was shot in the chest with a 9 mm gun while talking to a friend on a cell phone. A second shot hit him in the right forearm and then traveled into his chest.
After police received a tip that Bullock was the shooter, prosecutor Lewis Brandes said forensic experts discovered Bullock's DNA on a gun found at the scene and proved the gun was the one used in the shooting.
During his trial last month, defense attorneys, Michael Rosenbluth and Monique Lyon, argued Bullock fired the gun in self-defense after a bullet from an unknown person's gun passed through his pant leg from behind. They said he simply wheeled and fired indiscriminately.
The jury convicted Bullock of second-degree murder.
Because Bullock had just been released on parole at the time of the shooting, he was facing between 16 and 22 years in prison instead of the normal 10 to 22 years.
Brandes had argued for the maximum sentence, noting Bullock's juvenile criminal history and his 2000 conviction in a convenience store armed robbery. When asked by a probation officer if he would ever rob a convenience store again, Bullock responded "I don't know," Brandes said.
"He's missing something that the rest of us have, a conscience," Brandes said.
Source: http://www.dnalabsinternational.com/email_newsletter/vol_34_jan_07/vol34_ref04.html
Missouri - A man who was imprisoned for robbery when a DNA hit linked him to a string of five rapes was sentenced Thursday to life in prison.
A DNA sample taken from Gary L. Jackman in May 2005 linked him to the five cases. Four of the victims lived in the midtown and Westport area of Kansas City when they were attacked in 1985 and 1986.
Jackman, now 55, was sentenced after pleading guilty Thursday in Kansas City Circuit Court to five counts of felony sodomy and six counts of forcible rape. He was sentenced to one life term for each of the 11 counts. The terms will run concurrently and not consecutively.
Source: http://www.dnalabsinternational.com/email_newsletter/vol_34_jan_07/vol34_ref05.html
New York - It has become plainly obvious that a gross miscarriage of justice has been perpetrated against the three Duke University lacrosse players who were charged last spring with raping a stripper at a raucous house party.
Enough evidence has unfolded to conclude that Collin Finnerty of Garden City, L.I., Reade Seligmann of Essex Fells, N.J., and David Evans of Bethesda, Md., are the targets of an irresponsible prosecution by a race-baiting, politically craven district attorney.
Durham, N.C., DA Michael Nifong played the race card early and often in branding Finnerty, Seligmann and Evans, who are white, as having gang-raped a black woman. He called them "racists," and "hooligans" whose "daddies could buy them expensive lawyers."
"I'm not going to allow Durham's view in the minds of the world to be a bunch of lacrosse players at Duke raping a black girl," he said on his way to winning reelection with solid black support.
But last week, Nifong dropped the rape charges after defense lawyers proved he hadn't turned over exculpatory DNA evidence, probably deliberately. Even so, Nifong outrageously let stand sex abuse and kidnapping charges that any jury would dismiss out of hand.
Source: http://www.dnalabsinternational.com/email_newsletter/vol_34_jan_07/vol34_ref06.html
North Carolina - An arrest was made this week in a 1991 rape case after authorities matched DNA from the crime scene with a convicted felon in the state's database, police said.
Ronald Delaine Williams, 43, of Winston-Salem, was arrested Wednesday in connection with an attack on a 23-year-old woman June 19, 1991. Williams is accused of dragging the woman, raping her and stealing her rings, a bracelet and money, police said.
The case was one of 73 unsolved sexual assaults that Winston-Salem police sent to the State Bureau of Investigation's lab to test evidence from crime scenes against the state's DNA database of convicted felons.
Source: http://www.dnalabsinternational.com/email_newsletter/vol_34_jan_07/vol34_ref07.html
New Mexico - DNA tests have linked a sex offender from Washington to an alleged sexual assault.
Now Rudy San Martin, 43, is charged with rape and kidnapping. Police arrested him Tuesday on a warrant issued Dec. 21.
Police identified San Martin as one of three possible suspects, all men who attended a gathering at an Albuquerque apartment on Nov. 11. During the party, he raped a woman who got drunk after watching fights on television, according to the arrest warrant affidavit.
The woman told investigators she woke up with a man on top of her.
The Albuquerque Police Department crime lab was able to match DNA samples taken from the woman with the DNA of a convicted sex offender in Washington.
Source: http://www.dnalabsinternational.com/email_newsletter/vol_34_jan_07/vol34_ref08.html
New Mexico — Gabriel Avila told police he had been trying to help Katie Sepich when he "suddenly lost it" and attacked her, raping and strangling her until she stopped moving.
New details about Avila's confession to the 2003 homicide emerged Tuesday in court documents filed by Doña Ana County Sheriff's investigators.
Avila, 27, is charged with first-degree murder, kidnapping, tampering with evidence, and two counts of criminal sexual penetration.
Avila, who is already serving a nine-year prison sentence for burglary, was arrested Dec. 21 in the homicide after his DNA came back a match to DNA taken from Sepich's body.
District Attorney Susana Martinez said she could not comment further on the case, but that more information will come out through the trial.
Martinez said last week that Avila knew details of the case that had never been revealed to the public, including information about the rings that were taken.
Martinez said one of Sepich's rings was found in Avila's truck, which had since been sold.
Avila's bond was set at $1 million dollars by Magistrate Judge Joseph Guillory.
Source: http://www.dnalabsinternational.com/email_newsletter/vol_34_jan_07/vol34_ref09.html
California - From the moment the girl's body was found stuffed in a duffel bag nearly four years ago, her image haunted detective Scott Dudek — her feminine pajama pants, the single ankle sock decorated with snowflakes, the butterfly clip in her hair.
Yet so much was missing — she had no identification, and no one had filed a missing person report.
The FBI's crime database lists about 6,000 unidentified victims nationally. Some of them have gone unclaimed for decades. But something about the girl abandoned among the weeds behind a Castro Valley diner struck a cord with Dudek and his team at the Alameda County Sheriff's Department.
For the next three years and eight months, the detectives spent long days and thousands of dollars tracking her identity. The teen known as "Jane Doe" became "their girl."
DNA breakthrough
The investigators' persistence paid off. Last week, DNA results gave their victim a name: Yesenia Becerra Nungaray.
No one had reported her missing. The girl was buried under a marker reading "Unknown Child of God" in a funeral paid for by nearly 100 people.
An undocumented immigrant, Miguel Angel Nunez Castaneda, had apparently lived in Hayward with the victim. He is not a suspect, but a "person of interest" and is being sought by police. Detectives suspected the girl, like Nunez, might be from Yahualica, a town of 35,000 in the Mexican state of Jalisco.
They made the trip south. For three days, they spread the word to residents. One of their fliers landed in the hands of Maria Del Carmen, a mother of three whose middle child, her only daughter, had gone to the United States.
The detectives visited Del Carmen and talked to her into the night, looking through pictures and sharing their story, Dudek said.
They learned enough to believe they'd hit on the right family. But they needed a DNA test to confirm their hunch.
Last week, they got their answer. The girl's mother was devastated.
Now they're gearing up for the next step: finding her killer.
Source: http://www.dnalabsinternational.com/email_newsletter/vol_34_jan_07/vol34_ref10.html
Connecticut - Marlon Deloatch, a Manchester man who is an elder of an East Hartford church - and has been jailed since April based on a 10-year-old, mentally handicapped girl's allegations that he sexually molested her - wasn't the source of semen that was found in her underwear, DNA testing has shown.
After a prosecutor revealed the test results Thursday in Hartford Superior Court, Judge Thomas P. Miano substantially reduced the flooring worker's bonds in two of three court cases stemming from the girl's allegations.
The prosecutor, Chris Pelosi, hasn't dropped any of the sexual-assault charges against Deloatch, 34, of 44 Bissell St. in Manchester. The prosecutor said in court that police reports indicate that the girl's allegations against Deloatch include improper touching with his hands.
The DNA test results don't directly disprove such allegations. And, under Connecticut law, certain improper touching can rise to the level of first-degree sexual assault, the most serious charge Deloatch is facing.
A major question raised by the DNA results, of course, is whose semen was found in the girl's underpants and how it got there. No information on that issue was available Thursday.
Source: http://www.dnalabsinternational.com/email_newsletter/vol_34_jan_07/vol34_ref11.html
California - A expert in forensic investigations testified Wednesday that there is almost no chance blood lifted from a pillar in Hans Reiser's home and blood on a sleeping bag stuff sack found in his car is not that of his estranged wife Nina Reiser.
In fact, the chance is less than 1 in 45 trillion, said Shannon Cavness, a criminalist with the Oakland Police Department who both sides agreed is an expert in forensic biology and DNA analysis
Cavness testified during the second week of a preliminary hearing in Alameda County Superior Court in Oakland for Hans Reiser,
Hans Reiser is charged with murder, even though the body of Nina Reiser has never been found, a rare legal occurrence.
Cavness said tests concluded that DNA samples extracted from Nina Reiser's razor, contact lens case and cotton underpants match DNA samples extracted from the pillar and the sleeping bag stuff sack.
But Hans Reiser's defense attorney William Du Bois argued during cross examination of Cavness there is no way to know how long the blood had been on the pillar or the sleeping bag sack.
Also, he said, moisture or light could have degraded the samples. Cavness testified it was true she does not know what date they were deposited.
After the conclusion of the preliminary hearing — likely in January — Judge Julie Conger will determine whether there is enough evidence to hold a trial. The preliminary hearing continues today.
Source: http://www.dnalabsinternational.com/email_newsletter/vol_34_jan_07/vol34_ref12.html
Pennsylvania - Investigators say DNA evidence found at the scene of a deadly home invasion in Washington County helped them make an arrest in the nearly four-year-old case.
According to investigators, several men posed as utility workers to force their way into Shannon and Freda Dale's Peters Township home – where they beat the elderly man and literally scared his wife to death back in January 2003.
Freda Dale, 89, suffered a fatal heart attack that officials say was brought on by the trauma of the ordeal.
Today police announced the arrest of Mark Matthew Fisher, 22, in the case.
Fisher, who is already behind bars in Arkansas in connection with a home invasion there, is now facing murder charges for the death of Freda Dale, 89.
At a news conference this morning, investigators told reporters that DNA from a cigarette found outside the Dale's home and on duct tape used to tie up Freda Dale matched Fisher's DNA.
At this point, no other arrests have been made in the case; but authorities are still looking for several other suspects.
Source: http://www.dnalabsinternational.com/email_newsletter/vol_34_jan_07/vol34_ref13.html
California - Hayward police say D-N-A evidence collected from a crime scene more than 15 years ago has helped them crack an unsolved murder of a homeless woman.
Twenty-four-year-old Christie Lee Mefford was found beaten, sexually assaulted and strangled in the parking lot of a homeless shelter in October of 1991.
Her killer fled the scene when the shelter manager and a client came out to investigate noises they heard.
After seeing a man pedal away on a bicycle, they spotted Mefford's body on the ground.
Investigators arrested 45-year-old Duane Smith after his D-N-A matched evidence collected from the crime scene.
Smith is currently serving a five-year sentence in Avenal State Prison for a sex crime in another case.
He's now facing murder charges in Mefford's death.
Smith was scheduled to be released from prison in July.
Source: http://www.dnalabsinternational.com/email_newsletter/vol_34_jan_07/vol34_ref14.html
Wisconsin - DNA evidence taken from two sexual assault victims in Madison matched a DNA sample in the state's Crime Lab database, authorities say, enabling officers to arrest Antonio L. Pope last week in connection with the two assaults.
Source: http://www.dnalabsinternational.com/email_newsletter/vol_34_jan_07/vol34_ref15.html
Vermont - A jury in Orleans District Court took less than an hour Friday afternoon to find Derby resident Paul Tester guilty of felony sexual assault on a minor.
The jury also found Tester, 34, guilty of lewd and lascivious conduct on a child and two counts of furnishing alcohol to minors.
The two-day trial included testimony from two 15-year-old girls. One said she was assaulted and the other said she was fondled by Tester at the Will-O-Wood campground in Brownington on Aug. 6, 2005.
The trial offered a range of testimony, from personal accounts by the victims and police on Thursday to complex DNA evidence and competing expert witnesses on Friday.
Joe Abraham, a state forensic chemist specializing in DNA testing, said one test showed that the DNA in a sample taken from the girl was a match for Tester, with the odds of being wrong at 22 quadrillion to one.
Miller questioned typographical errors made in the forensic worksheet, which were caught and corrected by Abraham.
Defense expert Donald Riley, an associate professor at Washington University, challenged the procedures used by the state, raising questions about whether the samples were handled properly and the tests done correctly.
Riley said the samples weren't in airtight bags while in the state police barracks evidence room. Skin cells from clothing and a comforter taken from Tester as evidence could have become airborne in the evidence room and contaminated the samples from the girl, Riley said.
Police and state scientists said they followed standard procedures.
Flynn reminded jurors in closing arguments that Canino found sperm in the samples, not dead skin cells.
"There weren't strange flying sperm cells flying around in the state police barracks," Flynn said.
Flynn called the defense expert "a hired gun" who made $1 million over a decade in work for defense teams.
In closing arguments, Flynn said the girls' testimony might have had differences, but their statements put them with Tester, who took advantage of them.
"He preyed on those girls and that's what this case is about," Flynn said.
Tester did not testify.
After the verdict, when Flynn sought jail without bail until sentencing, Miller said that Tester had a right to maintain his innocence throughout the trial.
A sentencing hearing date will be set by Judge Devine.
Source: http://www.dnalabsinternational.com/email_newsletter/vol_34_jan_07/vol34_ref16.html
California - DNA evidence has led to special circumstances murder charges being filed against a 57-year-old Southern California man for the rape and murder of a 79-year-old Oakland widow 28 years ago, Alameda County Assistant District Attorney Tom Rogers said today.
Rogers said it's unusual for charges to be filed in such an old case, but he said old cases are being solved more frequently thanks to the expansion of California's DNA database and more aggressive efforts to match the DNA of victims and suspects.
Rogers said George Williams was scheduled to be arraigned today on murder charges and the special circumstance of committing a murder during the course of a rape.
The prosecutor said Williams is accused of killing Ione Helen Morrison at her apartment in the 3700 block of Park Boulevard in Oakland in the early morning hours of Aug. 13, 1978.
The case was unsolved for 28 years until authorities recently discovered a match between a DNA sample that Williams had to provide when he was released from probation in Orange County in November 2005 and DNA taken from Morrison's body.
Williams has a long record of burglaries and thefts, according to Rogers.
Source: http://www.dnalabsinternational.com/email_newsletter/vol_34_jan_07/vol34_ref17.html
California - An Orange County man arrested after DNA evidence linked him to the 1995 rape of a Fountain Valley woman was sentenced Friday to 31 years to life in prison.
Robert Castillo, 34, was convicted in September of forcible rape, forcible sodomy and kidnapping.
On Feb. 23, 1995, a 28-year-old woman walking home from a 7-Eleven store was grabbed from behind and forced at knife-point into a secluded area, where she was raped and sodomized, said Susan Schroeder of the Orange County District Attorney's Office.
The rape remained unsolved for seven years until evidence collected by the Fountain Valley Police Department was submitted in 2002 to a statewide DNA database by the Orange County Sheriff's Department, Schroeder said.
A positive DNA hit was made on Castillo, who was arrested in Costa Mesa on a parole violation.
He was charged with the rape on Aug. 22, 2002, Schroeder said.
Castillo was the 100th person in California to be arrested because of DNA evidence linking a suspect to a "cold case," authorities said.
Source: http://www.dnalabsinternational.com/email_newsletter/vol_34_jan_07/vol34_ref18.html
South Dakota - The prosecution rested its case Wednesday in the trial of a former South Dakota State University men's basketball player charged with sexually assaulting a woman in her dormitory room.
Andre Gilbert, 20, is charged with two counts of second-degree rape and a count of burglary.
A forensic specialist testified that stains on carpet in the dorm room were semen and matched Gilbert's DNA.
After the state rested, Gilbert's attorney said the prosecution had not proved its case and he asked the judge for a directed verdict of acquittal. The motion was denied.
A second man charged in the case, Mohamed Berte, 23, faces trial in January. He also is a former SDSU basketball player and is charged with aiding and abetting second-degree rape, burglary and illegal sexual contact.
Source: http://www.dnalabsinternational.com/email_newsletter/vol_34_jan_07/vol34_ref19.html
Maryland - Two convicted rapists pleaded guilty yesterday to abducting two women 20 years ago and raping them in the woods of northern Baltimore County.
The long-cold cases were solved when police matched DNA evidence from the 1986 sexual assaults to DNA samples collected from the two men in the course of other criminal cases, Baltimore County prosecutor Stephanie Porter said.
Martin Fedric Czosnowski, 41, of Essex and Anthony Klanavitch, 43, of Dundalk are scheduled to be sentenced in March.
Source: http://www.dnalabsinternational.com/email_newsletter/vol_34_jan_07/vol34_ref20.html
Montana - A Missoula man charged with raping a 16-year-old girl was found guilty Tuesday at the end of a three-day bench trial in District Court.
Wilbert Louis Fish, 23, wept openly in court as District Judge John Larson convicted him of sexual intercourse without consent, a felony, and scheduled a sentencing hearing for March 15 at 2 p.m.
Fish, who a Missoula jury previously acquitted on rape charges in a separate case, faces a penalty of up to 100 years in the Montana State Prison and no less than two years. He can also be fined up to $50,000.
Over the course of the trial, which began Friday, Larson heard from about 12 witnesses, but the case boiled down to the testimony of just two - Fish and the teenage girl who claims he raped her on Halloween night last year.
But Townsend said Fish became forthright only after learning that the prosecutor had obtained indisputable forensic evidence: swabs taken from the girl's body the night of the incident. Analysis of those swabs showed unmistakable traces of Fish's DNA on the girl's breasts and body.
Source: http://www.dnalabsinternational.com/email_newsletter/vol_34_jan_07/vol34_ref21.html
Did You Know?
Topic: Researchers conduct first molecular simulation of a long DNA strand
It turns out that sequencing the human genome--determining the order of DNA building blocks--has not completely cracked the code of how DNA directs various cellular processes. In addition to the sequence of the base pairs, the instructions are in the packaging--how DNA is folded within a cell.
Virginia Tech researchers used novel methodology and the university’s System X supercomputer to carry out what is probably the first simulation that explores full range of motions of a DNA strand of 147 base pairs, the length that is required to form the fundamental unit of DNA packing in the living cells -- the nucleosome. Contrary to a long-held belief that DNA is hard to bend, the simulation shows in crisp atomic detail that DNA is considerably more flexible than commonly thought.
The research is published in the December issue of the Biophysical Journal, in the article “A Computational Study of Nucleosomal DNA Flexibility,” by Jory Zmuda Ruscio of Leesburg, Va., a Ph.D. student in the Genetics, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Program at Virginia Tech, and Alexey Onufriev of Blacksburg, assistant professor of computer sciences and physics at Virginia Tech. They have been invited to do a platform presentation at the 51st Biophysical Society Annual Meeting in Baltimore in March.
There is about 12 feet of DNA in a human cell but it is packaged into nucleosomes – lengths of 147 base pairs each wrapped around eight special proteins. A nucleosome looks kind of like the lumpy beginning of a rubber-band ball. Or maybe more like a lumpy worm coil. Uncoiled, the worm wiggles, flexes, and even kinks, according to a simulation performed on System X.
As we know from watching forensic detective shows on TV, the DNA in all of an individual’s cells is identical. The DNA in fingernail cells is exactly the same as in muscle. Yet the cells are different. “This is because, roughly speaking, the DNA in different cell types is packed differently and the complexes it forms with the surrounding proteins are in different positions, so only the relevant part of the code can be read at a time,” said Onufriev. “Although nobody knows exactly how it happens, you can imagine reading only what you can see on a part of a crumpled newspaper.”
The traditional view is that DNA is relatively rigid and that considerable energy is required when it needs to be bent to form protein-DNA complexes. However, recent experiments (Nature, Aug. 17, 2006) have begun to challenge that view. “The famous double-helix may be much more flexible than previously thought,” said Onufriev.
The Virginia Tech research responded to this debate. Using 128 of System X’s 1,100 processors, the research resulted in a System X movie revealing DNA wiggling like a worm, showing greater flexibility than expected from the traditional view. The DNA packing in the nucleosome is also found to be surprisingly loose. “The implication is that it may not cost much energy to bend the DNA – even to bend sharply,” said Onufriev.
The methodology that is making it possible is based on the so-called “implicit solvent” approach being developed by Onufriev. “Biology does not happen in a vacuum,” he said. “We are 75 percent water, and the effect of the water environment must be taken into account when studying biomolecules.”
Previous simulations were often slowed because they accounted for the water that is present in living systems. For instance, in early studies of protein folding, only a few percent of the computing effort was being spent on the activity of the protein while the rest accounted for the activity of the surrounding fluids. The “implicit solvent” approach accounts for the role of water on average, but the movements of individual water molecules are not predicted, freeing computation capacity for simulation of whatever protein is being studied.
“Experiment cannot always probe atomic detail of living molecules because they are too small and often move too fast, said Onufriev. “But we can combine computational power with good algorithms to simulate these motions at high (atom-scale) resolution.
“It is an exciting time to do molecular modeling,” he said. “The computing power and the methodology have come to the point that we can begin to fully probe biology on timescales very relevant to living things – such as DNA packing.”
Virginia Tech's System X supercomputer was critical to this research, he said. “It was the combination of its sheer compute power with the algorithmic advantages that made it possible to run molecular simulations on that scale.”
So far, the Virginia Tech research team addressed the question of how flexible the DNA is, which is only a small piece of the “second part of the genetic code” puzzle, Onufriev said. “However, this small piece should pave the way to addressing bigger questions, such as ‘Exactly how is the tightly packed genetic content read by cellular machines?’”
“Atomic level simulations can complement experimentation and narrow competing theories,” said Onufriev. “For systems as large as the nucleosome, simulations using virtual water may be the only practical way to estimate the stability of various confirmations,” he said.
How DNA bends and flexes is critical for many cellular processes including cell differentiation and DNA replication. Although also observed in recent experiments, this unusual DNA flexibility is still unexplained. "Now seeing that DNA is not as hard to bend may lead to radical changes in our perspective," said Onufriev. "We are using these detailed pictures to see exactly how DNA bends and to understand the details of the mechanism behind it, something that is very hard or impossible to do experimentally."
Onufriev and his group of biochemistry, physics, biology, and other computer science researchers received a $1.1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop high performance computing methodology to create molecular models and to probe in atomic detail the mechanisms of biology.
The purpose of the NIH award is to develop the methodology for computer simulations of complex biological processes and address the question of the atomic mechanism of DNA flexibility, Onufriev said. “This research may not only provide fundamental insights into how life works at the molecular level, but also has applications in drug discovery and in particular for rational drug design, which is an important consideration for the NIH.”
Source: Virginia Tech
Source: http://www.dnalabsinternational.com/email_newsletter/vol_34_jan_07/vol34_ref22.html
Events and conferences for 2007 that may of interest to you include:
18th International Symposium on Human Identification - October 1-4, 2007
Renaissance Hollywood Hotel - Hollywood, California
Web site: http://www.promega.com/applications/hmnid/
AAFS – American Academy of Forensic Sciences – 59th Annual Meeting - February 19 through 24, 2007 in San Antonio, Texas
http://www.aafs.org/default.asp?section_id=meetings&page_id=aafs_annual_meeting.
AFDAA - The Association of Forensic DNA Analysts and Administrators - January 25 and 26, 2007 in Austin, Texas. The AFDAA is currently looking for speakers. If you are interested in giving a presentation, please contact Joe Warren at jwarren@hsc.unt.edu. For more information on the AFDAA please go to www.AFDAA.org.
The DNA Informant is a free bi-weekly email newsletter, published by DNA Labs International.
DNA Labs International is a private, ISO 17025 Accredited, Forensic Serology and DNA Identity Testing Laboratory, founded in 2004 by a Board Certified Fellow in Molecular Biology with over two decades of experience in Forensic Serology and DNA Analysis in United States Crime Labs. Our primary mission is to help our clients identify criminals within their jurisdiction by providing timely, accurate and cost effective DNA testing results. To do this we created an organization based on industry best practices from over 20 State Crime Labs around the United States. We are located in Deerfield Beach, Florida, just minutes from the Fort Lauderdale airport.
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