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Briefcase Sized DNA Analysis System
An anonymous reader writes "Japan's NEC Corporation along with Aida Engineering have developed a briefcase-sized DNA analysis system that enables the police to perform comprehensive DNA testing at crime scenes in as little as 25 minutes. The same test would take at least a day to a week (if re-testing or conformation is required) in the lab. The system is compact enough to be carried to crime scenes or other locations where quick DNA analysis is required, making it the world's first portable DNA analysis system."
This will be great for planting that DNA evidence that CSI watching juries love so much.
Can't wait to see the minimum-wage TSA employees using this.
Coming soon! To an airport near you!!
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
and I wouldn't mind sharing my DNA with the girl in the photo.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
So now the police can tamper with the evidence at the scene, rather than having the lab do it.
Will love this new system!
we see this used in CSI?
And Law & Order?
and CSI:Miami?
and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit?
and NCIS?
and Desperate Housewives?
and Law & Order: CI?
and OJ?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
I cannot imagine my rights being violated by some brash badge or overzealous detective. Never. I imagine all of the data collected will be kept private and secure. I cannot imagine my dna ever falling into the wrong hands. I cannot fathom an hmo denying to insure me due to my genes. No another tool which has added another layer of security and safety to the average true blooded american citizen. And for those nasty criminals (ahem *citizens*) we can use those new fangled pain guns to get them to give samples so we arrest them for all the horrible things they (ahem ahem *may* (g0d I have a sore throat today)) have done.
I love to see the principles of the constitution being upheld(ahem ahem ahem *read as trampling* (must be pneumonia(bad genes I guess))).
f
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/04/2032218
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Just don't try and take it on a plane eh?
"It's not a bomb- just has a lot of wires is all...."
"Please don't open that... it's worth more than a house."
what is the margin of error?
I guess it won't be long now until we see a sampler/scanner that fits into a turnstile.
From the blurb:
The same test would take at least a day to a week (if re-testing or conformation is required) in the lab.
Um, correct me if I'm wrong here, but the 1-7 days is still gonna be the case if/when you're verifying your results. This is just a "quick and dirty" test that will gain more acceptance and weight that it will deserve (::cough::POLYGRAPH::cough::). My guess is that it will just be a tool that Homeland Security/Your Average Cop will use to hold you until other tests *conclusively* provide a definite presence/absence answer (like PCR done by an ISO certified lab, HPLC done by an ISO certified lab, GCMS done by.. well you get the point.)
Just my $0.02 here.
E = m * c^(Hammer)
...how this will affect the genealogy DNA market. Family Tree DNA charges several hundred for Y chromosome analysis over a month or so. It wouldn't take many people wanting faster results to cover costs.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I can't wait for CSI:Tokyo!
geek page at KY speaks
Old luggable computers: http://oldcomputers.net/compaqi.html
What I don't in the picture is the isolation hood the operator will have to work in in order to prevent contamination of the sample(s). PCR (polymerase chain reaction, a way to amplify small sections of DNA for analysis) is incredibly sensitive and very subject to error caused by contamination. Multiple runs at different times is ESSENTIAL. And yes, IAAMB (I am a molecular biologist).
1. Will it connect to CODUS (sp?)
2. Will it run Linux?
The game.
I wonder how this works; obviously, 25 minutes isn't enough time to perform any PCR (even something like hot start PCR), so does it rely on having sufficient amounts of DNA available to perform whatever test they're using? Sometimes that can be a not-inconsiderable amount.
I didn't read the article, but eh. Just wondering.
If firefighters fight fire, and crimefighters fight crime, what do freedom fighters fight? - George Carlin
They scan you with one of these things for all kinds of diseases. Why not auto insurance? Don't want any alcoholics on the road. The possibilities for abuse are endless.
I'll wait for the Nitendo DNA kit, thank you very much.
FAQs are evil.
This little gadget doesn't reach its full Orwellian potential until the government completes compiling DNA profiles of every citizen in the country. They'll have this device shrunk down even smaller by then - maybe even have stand-alone installations in high traffic locations.
Beats RFID and "Real ID" all ways - with one of these wirelessly linked to the government's DNA database you've got instant positive ID on any person - right here, right now. And once they get this technology through a few revisions they'll have them sensitive enough to sniff someone's clothing and get enough of a sample for an ID. You might not even know that the undercover cop just ran an ID on you.
If that doesn't give you the chills - imagine what corporations would do with this technology. Sure, they'd say they need it to secure their businesses and such, but get a DNA sniffer going and connected to a few databases and it's a marketer's wet dream. (sniff) That's John Doe; married with three kids, $134,000 yearly income, bisexual, diabetic, credit score 715.
Imagine Minority Report's eye scanners but hidden and being operated by spammers. Brave new world indeed. Best to destroy the prototypes and documentation and maybe even the inventors - before this nightmare takes root.
Then the TSA goons will all be chipped and expected to check every bag,
"conformation is required"
If Japan is to maintain its 98.8% conviction rate!
SLM
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From TFA:
The compact unit can be used to:
(1) take cell samples,
(2) extract the DNA,
(3) perform polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification to generate copies of the DNA,
(4) perform electrophoresis to measure the spacing between DNA bands (to create the genetic fingerprint), and
(5) perform short tandem repeat (STR) analysis to create a unique genetic profile for the individual,"
As I'm currently a grad student in biotechnology (and am performing similar processes in the lab), I feel compelled to respond to their claims on processing time. Taken step by step;
1: simple enough, although some cells are more suitable to DNA work than others.
2: the main obstacles in extracting DNA are proteins and prokaryotic contamination in the sample. DNA is almost always complexed with proteins like polymerases and histones. These proteins effectively prevent the DNA from migrating through agarose or acrylamide; the resulting electrophoresis bands would be almost meaningless. Prokaryotes are pretty much ubiquitous. The problem is that they carry their own DNA which can confuse results, and they carry endonucleases which chop apart most any DNA they come in contact with; destroying the reliability of the gel electrophoresis. Endonuclease digestion of DNA is standard fare for genetics, and I'm assuming that it's performed here, but the contamination of unknown endonucleases from uncharacterized bacteria causes problems regardless. Time required to separate the DNA from the proteins: 1 hour at best.
3: PCR incubation time depends on the length of the DNA chains being amplified, and the initial size of your sample. 10 minutes would be a best case scenario, and that's with ideally sized DNA fragments (whole-genome DNA is far too large), and a large initial sample (not likely).
4: As mentioned previously, protein contamination can make the electrophoresis results almost unreadable. Furthermore, moving that much DNA through a gel in such a short time requires very high voltages. The banding which results from high voltages is generally very blurred, making the 'fingerprint" unreadable. Moreover, whole-genome DNA doesn't really separate into bands; it makes big long smears, so standard staining practice is useless for diagnostics. The last gel I ran with genomic DNA (corn in this case) required about 45 minutes, and that was a small gel using high voltage.
5: STR analysis is touchy. Basically, you use a radioactive or chemoluminescent probe on both the genomic DNA, and a DNA with known STR lengths and compare how bright the sample is compared to the standard. An accurate reading requires a fairly precise estimate of the amount of DNA in your sample; a measure that usually requires a well-calibrated photospectrometer that also needs time to warm up and be calibrated. To further complicate matters, your DNA is in a gel. Getting the tagged probe into the gel (or getting the sample DNA back out of the gel) so that annealing can occur takes time. A southern blot (process involving the removal of DNA from a gel) is usually allowed to run overnight. After annealing takes place, the extra probe molecules are washed away. If excess stray probe is allowed to sit around, or if the annealing isn't complete in the first place, the measurement becomes unreliable. The minimum time I would think feasible for this step would be an hour. In a lab, the labeling alone is normally a 3 hour process. Accuracy would suffer tremendously as time decreases.
So yeah, in conclusion, their time frame for getting results is obscenely short. Severly truncated time frames produce equally severe errors. I don't personally know any scientist who would vouch for the validity of these results.
"Operating systems suck: you're better off using only the BIOS" --trainsaw.com
khasim (12/9/06): In a blind taste test, more people preferred Coke over the Pepsi that I had previously pissed in.
PCR takes 4 hours, Electrophoresis takes half an hour to an hour. The portable machine may
do these things, but it doesn't do them in "25 minutes". That would be a much bigger deal than
mere portability.
Anybody who has done the least bit of undergrad biology research knows this.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
It's nothing but a gel electrophoresis kit in a carrying case with a built-in computer. Very gimmicky, and very scary that this might convict you of murder, and might do so even in the hands of someone who doesn't really understand the results they are interpreting. Hopefully it gets one thing right: It preserves the sample.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Being in a country like India, where the crime rate is very high, something like this was needed. Most of the criminals get away by bribing officers to destroy evidence. If a DNA test can be conducted within 25 minutes, and that too at the crime scene, it would be wonderful.
which also fit into a briefcase.
...)
(In the category "Things I want vs. things I need"
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
yay, now the fucking yanks are going to dna test people at there borders, o look your great great gradpa was vaguely related to some one else we don't like, right off to the americaninfcation/tourture camps with you !
Cop: *pulls up in AE86 police car* Stop! Tokyo PD!
Killer: You think you're just gonna take me in!? Like hell you will! *reaches for side of belt*
*cue slow motion*
*cop reaches for side of belt*
Killer: Go! Murkrow!
Cop: Charmeleon! I choose you!
*cue seizure-inducing lights*
Hey, I'd watch it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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At least a day; at most a week?
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at least, a day to a week (the interval can be no shorter than 7 days; compare: "6 days to a week and 6 days")?
On top of being lazy, this lets people give bizarre and ill-defined deadlines -- what would you do if your mechanic said your car would be ready in "at least a day to a week"?Sony ha
I've seen all sorts of portable equipment in use over here in Germany. The Polizei used to use their spring-loaded sticks to "acquire" blood samples to send off to a lab. Now all they have to do is hold you down, pull out some blood in a syringe and they can do an on-the-spot drug test to determine if they have probably cause to search your vehicle for drugs.
A piece of equipment like this would undoubtedly make it into their squad cars to track down people who left DNA at a crime scene.
Improper procedures, accidental contamination, etc. I just don't see it. The fact that the technology is there does not mean that police are qualified to use it properly. Look at what a mess they have made of computer forensics and "profiling" statistics...
Why would you take a segment of your population that is NOT exactly well-known for their IQs, and give them portable DNA-testing equipment? Seems like a recipe for disaster to me.
Good thing Greg Sanders is already out of the lab - this thing would SERIOUSLY jeopardize his job security.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
I think this is a lot better than it appears to be in terms of keeping innocent people out of jail.
You see although the odds of getting the same result for these STR checks between two random people is supposedly 1 in billions, in reality some papers put the odds of getting a false positive at 1 in 100. And the reasons are mostly due to lab errors. You have bad protocol. Sample degradation from being mishandled at the crime scene, or not being transported correctly, or being stored badly, sample mixup, mislabelled samples, or samples being loaded into the wrong tubes as it's being processed, contamination. That's just a splash of one sample onto a glove, and then touched into another sample going to PCR, or contaminated pipette tips, or badly cleaned glassware, or any of a million fuckups that can happen in a busy lab.
Those kind of mistakes (if you work in a lab), you will see are so common as to make ridiculous the claims that a single test can show XYZ to the odds of millions to one. There is hardly ever redundancy, the labs are usually national forensic labs, or state forensic labs in the US that process all the samples in the same lab, on the same benches, in the same LFCs, in the same PCR machines.
And just to put everything into one post, the labs are also often not doing blind tests. They know that in this case it's this guys blood and he is suspected of doing this and so on. That should never be the case, there's a reason the statue of justice has a blindfold on.
Caveat, i don't work in a forensic lab. I do however have the training to do so, could get a job there if I wanted, and do work with very similar procedures and the material/equipment as they use. And as I hope the post points out, it's not the specific procedures that the errors are introduced in, it's the standard lab work. People not changing gloves often enough, not cleaning thoroughly, running many samples at the same time to save time, not RNAase-zapping, etc etc etc.
Being able to run the sample AT the scene means that there is much less chance of mixing up samples, the samples are much fresher, the odds of someone tampering with the samples is almost nil, the DNA produced by PCR can be stored rapidly and safely in water until it can be checked again at proper lab to ensure it's accurate. The samples can also be examined and stored by the (assumedly) qualified person running this machine.
all in all, it's progress, sure it can be used in a bad way, almost anything can, but I humbly submit the knee-jerk issues raised about liberty and so forth are very much apropos of nothing in this case.
Criminal : "I didn't kill anybody!"
SGT. "So, you say you're not the killer eh? We'll see about that. We just got this new test that'll tell us if you murdered him or not."
Officer : "Aight Sarget. I got the kit. It says we need parental supervision before handling chemicals."
SGT. : "Set timer for five minutes."
Officer : "Check."
SGT. : "Fill Vial 'A' with 25ml saline solution."
Officer : "Check."
SGT. : "Warm to 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Then add suspect sample to Vial 'A'."
Officer : "Check. No wait....Ok. Check."
SGT. : "Activate timer. After 2.5 minutes, Add 2ml of liquid from evidence sample in Vial 'B'. Stir with enclosed plastic rod."
Officer : "Check."
--5 minutes later--
Officer : "Time!"
SGT. : "Using enclosed eydropper, place ONE (1) drop onto test strip in marked area. BLUE=MATCH, CLEAR=NO MATCH"
Officer : "What if it's pink?"
SGT. : "He's pregnant."
I would seriously question the accuracy of these tests, since there a many factors, both environmental and analytical that can affect the outcome of the test. Laboratory tests are meant to be conducted in a LABORATORY, not a Samsonite briefcase. Now, you will be giving every rookie officer who can hold a Q-Tip the same credibility as an educated, trained, and well-experienced forensic technician.
Laboratory setting are ideal for conducting tests and experiments: The are well-equipped, well-engineered, staffed by technicians with years of experience (discounting interns, of course), don't sacrifice accuracy for space, and allow a consistent, managed environment for evidence analysis, storage, and custody control. Treating DNA evidence as if it were a case of bad breath is just wrong. If I were a judge, I would seriously question the integrity of such tests and their results.
This is treating Forensic Science less like science and more like a "Conviction-In-A-Can".
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Given that DNA tests become more mainstream, it would be rather interesting to see how large a percentage of the population actually is a chimera. If it turns out to be "popular", DNA tests could lose a lot of their credibility (in which case DNA-tests-at-the-counter become a hazard instead of a benefit).
"approved", not "approves". The text is directly from a letter of his to Benjamin Vaughan.
We call it Voight-Kampff for short.
a bit like the G.E.C.K. from Fallout.
This will bring huge cultural changes. In just 25 years, people will have no names, that is names like John C. Smith or Matvei Nikolaevich Morosov will be obsolete. Instead all 6.3 billion people's genetical code will be sequenced and form the basis for world-wide unique personal ID hash values, which then converted to SSH-babble style pseudowords will form your name. E.g. people will have assigned redskin-ish names like "Sitting Bull Stream White Cloud Tilted Tent" or chinese-style names like "Pei Jun Li Xia Bao Wei Gong" as a pronouncible and rememberable resresentation of their 512-bit or so personal ID hash string. There won't be two people with the same name anywhere on Earth, as for a few years we know that even identical twins are slightly different in DNA!
It will be impossible to lie about your name, because desktop DNA machines will be everywhere, just spit into them and in less than 1 minute your unfakeable genetics-based identity will be displayed on the screen. Just seeing your name people will instantly know if you are a girl or a boy, which is a problem with current names in many countires. They will also know if you are white or negro, or blood relative of another name!
I am glad this will happen, because this will provide US-wide consistent personal identification, so murderers cannot trick law enforcement for years living under false names and the unification will be the first step in transforming USA into a unified nation-state, where fedral laws are the same and only law everywhere for any of the 305 million citizens. No need for White House to mess with mandated structure driving licences, DNA based naming will end the current person's registration anarchy in the USA.
Remember, the anarchy of having no centralized citizenship register for USA allowed the godless communist russkies to insert literally hundreds of spy agents under fake american papers and deeply intrude America's science, tech, military and politics circles during the Cold War. On the other hand, USSR with its central registration system proved essentially un-penetratable. Such disparity would be impossible in the DNA-name age!
There is something mis leading about the story - how can it take much longer in a lab, other then the transport time ?
The lab can, due to its higher volume, have a large, automated system; such systems, at least in clinical diagnostics (roche, abbott, dade behring immunoassays) quicker and more reliable then poc (point of care ) systems.
Re the accuracy, the basic idea is fine, but the devil is in the details - for instance, pcr based systems are notorious for cross contamination; if even a micro micro drop of the post pcr material contaminates anything, you have real problems.
The photo in the article shows someone with handheld pipets (the grey thing in the ladys hand) such pipets are notorious for aerosol production, which leads to cross contamination
Ben Franklin had a great knack for getting people to do what he wanted them to do, AT THAT PARTICULIAR JUNCTURE. It was part of the reason he was so successful.
While I'll not call him a liar (I don't think he was), he was certainly a "spinner" and turn a phrase.
Just after I graduated from uni, I took a bunch of temporary typing jobs (before I finally accepted my fate and took a job as a software developer...)
One of the more interesting jobs was data-entering the forensic reports that came back from the lab, for the West Midlands Police Force. These contained a basic description of the case, as well as the results from the test and the cost that they were billed at (it seems that most of the forensic stuff was done by independant companies and billed back to the taxpayer).
Most of the checks were testing suspected cannabis found by the police during a search - these always came back positive, and cost £35 per check, even when it was only 0.01 grams or similar!
More depressing was a case where someone had been stabbed and a blood covered knife had been found in a nearby rubbish bin, along with patches of blood nearby and on the suspect's clothes. There were (IIRC) 9 separate blood samples, and each one cost £750 to test.
Each one came back 'inconclusive'. That'll be £6750 please, Mr Taxpayer.
I thought DNA was microscopic... but if there's some the size of a briefcase, then I guess we better analyze it.
The Admin and the Engineer
Your honor, it's not my child ( or insert favorite bodily fluid )!.. err wait. what is that black box.? 'Arrgh! its 'instaDNA' ?!?!? I'm doomed!
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's great that they can scan my dna without leaving the scene and all, but wouldn't it be cool if it did it with a modified standard cdrom drive, like this chemical scanner?
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