ABOVE: ISTOCK, JOVANMANDIC
Matching crime-scene DNA to data in a genealogy site recently helped cops nab a suspect in a decades-old murder case referred to as the Golden State Killer. Now, scientists say, the technique could be used to identify more than 60 percent of US citizens with European ancestry by a given DNA sample.
“In a few years, it’s really going to be everyone,” study coauthor Yaniv Erlich, a computational geneticist at Columbia University, tells Science.
Erlich and his colleagues were able to home in on the identity of a person from an anonymous DNA sample using only a basic characteristic about the person, such as her age, and a genetic database of 1.28 million individuals. The team winnowed the results from more than 1 million people to roughly 20 with the technique and could narrow it even further using census data and other publicly available records, according to ...
