Police Can Now Identify Your Eye Color from DNA
Police Can Now Identify Your Eye Color from DNA
If they have a case with very few leads, police now have another tool in their arsenal that will at least provide one distinct factor. Eye color of the perp. Let’s say a bad guy left some DNA at a crime scene. That DNA can now be used to predict the suspect’s eye color, according to Manfred Kayser at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands. They have developed IrisPlex, which can predict with 94 percent accuracy whether a person has blue or brown eyes from a simple sample of DNA.
The government will likely approve it within weeks and this huge news for police since often times they have DNA, but can’t find a match on a DNA database. Right now it isn’t accurate enough to stand up in court, but one day soon it might be.
IrisPlex examines six single-letter variations in DNA, which are strongly linked to eye color, and categorizes them as blue, brown or “undefined.” Undefined is classified as meaning an intermediate color like green, grey, or a mix. They have already held tests on populations from seven different European countries, where it predicted blue or brown eyes with a high degree of accuracy. This should help them solve many more cases when they implement it.