We carry DNA in each of our cells. For the doctor, this genetic information provides important information about our diseases, for example.
Crime investigators have also been isolating DNA from crime scenes for years.
Isolating DNA is now increasingly easier. Human DNA can now be isolated from the air, water, or soil. Maybe too easily.
It falls into the environment from people’s skin in small flakes. It is also released into nature and the environment along with loose hair and fur.
Even the smallest drop of your saliva also carries your DNA. It is also registered in the chemical DNA code of the dead cell.
Society may not be ready for what follows from the ease of finding DNA, says University of Florida zoologist David Duffy.
He leads a project that finds out how much human DNA can be extracted from nature and the environment that can be sequenced, i.e. read through in an understandable way.
Landing and detached plant and animal cells and decomposing microbes spread DNA into nature, which scientists call environmental dna or e-dna.
Biologists and environmental scientists collect it because e-dna offers a lot of information about the area’s ecology and species.
E-dna tells about the diseases of organisms and the relationships between different animal populations. In turn, the e-dna of soil deposits can tell which genes the environment has already lost.
E-dna also saves fieldwork costs.
When zoologist Duffy and his team collected and analyzed DNA from land, sea and air, always with the same surprise. Human DNA.
Almost inevitably, all the material also contains material from the people who visited and passed by, and therefore also DNA.
“We have been constantly surprised by how much human DNA we found in nature, as well as its good quality,” says Duffy According to the Science Alert online service.
“Most of the time, the quality corresponds to taking a DNA sample directly from a person.”
Human DNA is almost everywhere. The researchers also found it in the sand of an uninhabited island, albeit in the researchers’ own fresh footprints.
Yet not long ago, it was much more difficult for Duffy to find human gene sequences in ordinary, environmental DNA samples.
The sequencing was very accurate, but the human DNA fragments were not separated in the samples.
Duffy’s methods revealed that the so-called shotgun method regularly produced human DNA in the samples.
In it, samples are taken from the object sporadically, in small DNA sequences. So it’s a bit like shooting a shot at a target.
Duffy and his group took, for example, water and sand samples from the area of the Whitney Marine Biology Laboratory in Florida and near the sea turtle nursery.
He also collected samples from a river in Duffy’s home country, Ireland. Samples were taken from an uninhabited island, also from mountain streams, far from human habitation.
They found human DNA in almost all of the objects, which the researchers called “genetic human by-catch.”
Of the samples, only the isolated island and the remote stream area did not contain human DNA.
However, as soon as researchers, for example, arrived on a deserted island, they left their genes in the sand, in their footprints.
“The findings mean that if you don’t screen the samples for human DNA, anyone who understands the sample can also use this information,” says Duffy.
Research information is usually free.
E-dna thus raising ethical questions.
Does the researcher who collects the DNA samples have to get the person’s consent for their DNA to be included in the test samples?
Or do we have to start inventing ways to get all human dna out of samples containing e-dna?
The legal ramifications of this “genetic by-catch” have yet to be fully determined, says Duffy.
People are at risk of being subject to continuous genetic surveillance. We can imagine an authority or an institution that for some reason would keep an archive of all the DNA fragments found by researchers.
Sometimes our DNA can unintentionally drift to places where crimes have been committed. Then even the innocent will be on the list of suspects.
People The amount of e-dna is now increasing all the time. It begs the question of who has the final say on who gets to collect our e-dna data.
The research is also described in the press release in the EurekAlert online service and that published by the scientific journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
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