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First, there was just plain old mistaken identity. The kind where a bespectacled old lady picked an innocent person from a lineup, effectively ruining a life. If you didn't have a good lawyer, well, you went up the river. Or the creek.
Then, evil masterminds figured out how to transfer fingerprints to latex gloves, and could incriminate people will-he nil-he all over town, if they so desired.
After a bit, Computer Graphics Imaging came along, and your face could be spliced into any number of embarrassing situations, and done so well, that graphics experts could not bet whether it was real or fake.
Well, this ones a kicker. If one method of identifying a criminal has been touted as the ultimate proof of guilt, it's DNA sampling. Courtrooms have been wowed by the fact that a forensics specialist could say, to within one chance in five hundred million, that you are or aren't the perp. Not any longer.
Researchers in Israel have been successful in manufacturing artificial DNA, which when submitted to standardized DNA testing, would not be discernible from the actual natural DNA in a particular person's cells. Using a DNA printer, they constructed convincing DNA fragments from the results of DNA analysis reports. They estimate that only about 425 known fragments would be enough to construct fragments convincing enough to frame anyone who is in a DNA database.
Of course, any digging by the forensics specialist past the normal testing would lead to the discovery of problems with the sample, as the fragments would not be complete, but the researchers have gone one step further in their busting of the infallibility of DNA testing.
A technique has been around since 2001 that allows the entire human genome to be amplified, starting from a sample with fewer than 10 cells. Here, you'd definitely need a DNA sample from the individual you're trying to frame, but it wouldn't take much of one. A sample of as few as ten donor cells is all that is needed, easily found in a single hair, residue from a cup you drank from, or a blood sample from a trip to the doctors office.
Then, the existing DNA is spun out of a medium, such as blood, semen, or saliva and replaced with the artificial DNA that was produced in the lab, giving it, to all ordinary tests, the appearance of being the blood of another person. To test their theory, the blood of a woman was purified of DNA, which was then replaced by the "fake" DNA. The sample was sent to a lab for analysis, and the results came back that the blood was that of the man in question. As far as the testing facility was concerned, everything looked legitimate.
Fortunately, in proving there was a problem, they also discovered the solution to the problem. It seems that natural DNA picks up a chemical modification called methylation, which is not present in the fake DNA. So for now, testing for methylation will be an important, although laborious and time consuming, addition to the quality controls implemented in DNA analysis.
At least until someone figures out how to synthesize it.
Oh, and the company that discovered the ability to fake DNA samples, Nucleix, based in Tel Aviv, is also the company that is selling the methylation testing procedure to forensics labs.