DNA test that tells identical twins apart to be used in forensic testing

In 2004, two young women were abducted at gunpoint while walking home near Boston at night. The crimes happened eight days apart, but the pattern was the same: The women were shoved into a car by two men, pistol-whipped, driven to a different location, and raped. While collecting her clothes, the second victim managed to grab the condom one of the men had worn; she hid it in her pocket, and turned it in as evidence.

One of the two men involved pleaded guilty to the attacks in 2012. The other remained at large. Police had a suspect, but they couldn’t pin the crime on him due to a twist of genetic fate: He had an identical twin brother, and DNA from the condom matched both siblings. But now, a decade after the assaults, scientists have developed a genetic test that can distinguish between identical twins, and it may be used in court for the first time in this case.

Normally, forensic tests work by extracting and amplifying regions of DNA collected from a crime scene. Then, investigators look for a match between the evidence and a suspect’s genetic sequence. Ordinarily, this kind of testing is sufficient: Most humans vary from one another enough for investigators to easily identify whether a suspect left blood, skin, hair, semen, or something else at a crime scene.

This is not true with identical twins. Grown from the same, single fertilized egg, monozygotic twins have nearly identical genomes. So, for decades, twins committing crimes had a relatively easy way to establish doubt—based on DNA evidence alone, their identical sibling would be equally as likely to have deposited whatever genetic material might have been left at a crime scene.

Read full original article: DNA Test That Distinguishes Identical Twins May Be Used in Court for First Time

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