Eye on DNA Headlines for 12 September 2007

by Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei
Posted September 12, 2007 in DNA and the Law, Eye on DNA Headlines

• Matt at Behavioral Ecology Blog hosts Tangled Bank #88.
• Telegraph has a chilling Q&A on DNA evidence in the Madeleine McCann case. Madeleine was reportedly abducted in May 2007 while she and her family were vacationing in Portugal. Her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, were named suspects last Friday. Detectives believe they have enough evidence to charge them with accidentally killing Madeleine. The McCanns say they’re being framed.
• Australian police in Victoria added their DNA files to the national database yesterday. More than 2,000 matches to unsolved violent crime were found almost immediately; these matches between the suspects’ DNA and DNA found at crime scenes were flagged if the DNA shared 12 or more DNA markers. Further investigations will be pursued for matches at 16 or more markers. The Australia national DNA database currently has over 350,000 DNA samples. (For the purposes of comparison, California has entered 295,000 DNA samples into its database since July which cleared a backlog of almost 400,000.)
• Vitamin C may not prevent cancer by reducing DNA damage as previously thought. Instead, vitamin C and other antioxidants may work by removing the free radicals needed by a protein called hypoxia-induced factor (HIF-1) that helps cancer cells survive with limited oxygen.

  Researcher Ping Gao at Johns Hopkins:

  If DNA damage was not in play as a cause of the cancer, then whatever the antioxidants were doing to help was also not related to DNA damage.

• Thank you to JJ Yong for adding Eye on DNA to the DNAmazing.com blogroll.
• The UK National Center for Biotechnology Education has the best collection of DNA ephemera I’ve ever seen (aside from Eye on DNA, of course.)
• Do you have a Facebook? Join The DNA Network’s Facebook group!

Tags: genetics, genes, dna, madeleine mccann, crime, dna database, forensics

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