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According to one study, about 60% of the US population with a European heritage can be identified from its DNA by searching consumer websites, even if they have never made their website available to them. own genetic information.
And this number will increase as more people upload their DNA profiles to websites that use DNA analysis to find relatives, said the authors of the study published Thursday by the journal Science .
The use of such databases for criminal investigations made headlines in April, when authorities announced that they had used a website on genealogical genealogy to connect a DNA to the crime scene to a man who they later accused of being the so-called Golden State Killer, a serial rapist and murderer.
In general, these searches start on a site by finding a parent related to a DNA sample. Detectives can then use other information such as published family trees, public records and survivor lists in obituaries, as well as everything they know about the person whose DNA is started the process. They can build their own speculative family trees. Finally, this may indicate someone whose DNA matches the original sample.
With genetic databases, "it takes a tiny fraction of the population to identify many other people," said Yaniv Erlich of Columbia University, author of the study.
Each person in a DNA database acts "like a beacon illuminating hundreds of distant relatives," said Erlich, who is also scientific leader of the MyHeritage website.
His article focuses on Americans of European descent, as these people are overrepresented in DNA databases, making it easier to find loved ones.
The researchers started with the 1.28 million participants on the MyHeritage site when they did the work. Most had a North European genetic background. For each of them, they looked for parents more distant than their cousins elsewhere in the database.
About 60% of the time, they found a person whose genetic similarity was at least equal to that of a third cousin, similar to the degree of kinship that led to the suspect of the state killer, Golden State . Third cousins share great-great-grandparents.
With some basic assumptions about the type of data that would be available to a suspect, the researchers calculated that they could reduce the possible identity of the original person to only 16 or 17 people. It's limited enough so that the police can focus on further investigation, Erlich said.
Erlich and his co-authors have suggested that such research could cast a wider net in the near future. A database with DNA profiles of only 2% of the population is enough to match almost everyone to a person who is as close as his or her third cousin, researchers said. From there, they calculated that the genetic profiles of about 3 million Americans of European descent could give the equivalent of a third cousin for over 90% of this ethnic group.
The websites are getting closer to that, said Erlich, noting that MyHeritage now has more than 1.75 million participants. He stated that the website does not allow forensic searches.
Two DNA experts not connected to the study said the third and fourth cousins could lead to identifications.
"Because an average person has so many distant cousins, it is reasonably likely that one or more of them will be in a publicly searchable database, even if only a small fraction US population is included, "Graham Coop and Michael Edge of the University of California, Davis, wrote in a statement to the Associated Press.
"The fact that most suspects can be identified in this way is predictable" from mathematical calculations, and the new document provides a compelling demonstration, they said.
However, the work raises important political questions, they said. Should anyone other than law enforcement be allowed to do such research? And under what circumstances should they be allowed?
"How should we react to the fact that the decisions of our fourth cousins, which we may have never met, affect his privacy?" they asked.
In an interview, Edge pointed out that when people add their DNA profiles to a publicly available genealogy site, "they do not necessarily think about the genetic confidentiality of their distant relatives."
Amy McGuire, a professor of biomedical ethics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said that police searches done using websites on DNA and genealogy had sometimes highlighted an incorrect person.
"You hope … the victim of the wrong track can be easily eliminated" by providing DNA, she said. "But you are still experiencing an invasion in this person's personal life by being the subject of an investigation."
Some people would say that it is worthwhile to help the cause of justice, but others "would find it very painful," she added.
McGuire said that there was an active legal debate about whether the police should be able to "make a fishing expedition" by using DNA genealogy sites without a warrant.
She recently published a survey that suggests that most people are in favor of the police searching genetic genealogy databases. But support was much more important for investigations involving violent crimes and crimes against children than for non-violent crimes.
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Follow Malcolm Ritter on @MalcolmRitter. His recent work is available at http://tinyurl.com/RitterAP
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The Health and Science Department of the Associated Press receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Scientific Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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