Inherited alleles revealing an incestuous paternity.

Some rape cases result in the pregnancy of the victim and if the case is not reported to the police after the act with a subsequent gynaecological examination of the girl and the taking of a vaginal swab, there is no way of connecting the rape case with the perpetrator, except by parentage determination using DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) analysis after abortion or induced delivery. In order to solve the rape case of a minor girl of 14 years which resulted with pregnancy, where a 60-year-old man was accused of the rape, DNA was extracted from blood samples from the girl and the putative assailant and from the foetus after its induced delivery. The autosomal short tandem repeats (STR) typing for 15 different loci showed differences in 6 STR loci between the putative assailant as a father and the foetus, thus excluding the tested paternity. A large number of identical loci between the mother's and the child's genotype led us to consider the possibility of incestuous paternity. Analysis of DNA samples from the girl's father and brother clarified the case as brother-sister incest. Key words: rape case, short tandem repeats (STRs) genotype, incest.

Use your DNA to complete your family tree

The internet offers a great range of possibilities to search for and find information from known and forgotten ancestors and family members. Filling the leaves of our family tree has become easier than ever before. However, the next breakthrough does not come from Google labs but from the scientific advances that have made it possible to perform personalized genetic testing and DNA sequencing easily and affordably.

Besides the now famous (or infamous for many) paternity DNA testing kits, DNA testing companies are now offering tests to probe the ethic origin of the person whose DNA is being analyzed. Without getting to the point of the personal genome, ancestry DNA kits are simple, fast and inexpensive. These tests are not so powerful to provide name, address and eye colour of all your ancestors back to King David, but they can give you a good idea of where in the world your DNA was around maybe a few hundred years ago. This may come very useful to confirm (or discard) a tip of a distant relative in a specific region of the world.

Click here to find more information about ancestry DNA testing, or consult these excellent references:

     

The Lewis surname DNA project

Reconstructing the genealogy of a common surname may seem a daunting task. In spite of this, the LEWIS Surname DNA Project has been established in 2003 to gather information from as many Lewis family groups as possible. Since then, the idea has become is one of the larger DNA surname projects, with almost 240 participants.

The website dedicated to promote this project invites all interested Lewises to take a DNA ancestry analysis specifically tailored to this group. under an agreement with a DNA testing company, the test is made available to the interested persons with a substantial discount. This DNA analysis looks for markers located on the Y chromosome, and so it is done exclusively on males.

The aim of the project is to create a basis for identifying participants who share a common male ancestors, and when complemented with documented Lewis pedigrees, these tests can also help to find links between Lewis groups not yet known to be related.