It's All About . . . DNA

And this week bears that out! In high school, I remember in chemistry class learning about DNA and I made it a point to recall what the acronym stood for and it has remained stuck in my head ever since -- deoxyribonucleic acid, amazing after all these years.

But DNA is ever increasing in awareness and rightly so. I know that in the coming months and years it will no doubt play an even larger role in our everyday lives.

The huge variations of the genome displayed above are just the tip of the iceberg. I keep studying the different presentations and still am confused -- as I have mentioned before -- each time I attend a webinar or read another article I gain a bit more understanding. Why should it be so complex . . .

In last week's post, I mentioned -- almost tongue-in-cheek -- that National DNA Day was coming. And just how did I plan to observe the day -- never did I dream that there would be an amazing DNA achievement announced that very day:

On Wednesday, April 25th, DNA Day, it was all over the news -- DNA played a huge role in leading to the potential solving of one of the largest cold cases in California's history.

Less than a week prior, the ultimate perpetrator of a huge string of killings, rapes, and burglaries was not identified to the authorities.

Then, DNA was used and in a couple of days, the killer was identified and arrested.

Every news channel that we watched had this story at the top or close to the top of their report. I was just transfixed by the revelation. Having lived near many of the locations of the crimes over my years in California it was stunning to hear the details.

I happened to live in another state during most of the spree -- but never-the-less, I paid attention to the continuing stories and news articles over the roughly decade of their occurrences.

What is really astounding to me is that just a week ago I happened to see a detailed report about a book that sounded interesting -- a best-seller -- and so I ordered it on Kindle. It was about the Golden State Killer and written by a young author who unfortunately died before completing the book:

I was transfixed while reading the author's description of the details mostly geographically of where these crimes took place and the insights into her sense of the perpetrator's state of mind.

Just as I neared the end of the book -- which was ultimately finished by her husband from her extensive notes -- the above news story hit.

What a shame that the author did not live to see the culmination of her writing and constant encouragement to "keep after" this criminal.

Michelle McNamara, I believe was very instrumental in having this case becoming close-to-being solved. She was relentless in her follow up.

In her book, she could of course not identify the criminal by name, but certainly could identify him through "m.o." and through DNA capture.

The arrest was ultimately a result of detectives and officials using the features of a genealogical DNA testing company (gedmatch) to discover distant relatives of the person that they had a DNA profile of and then to create the family tree to identify that person.

Finally, law enforcement obtained a current sample of DNA (how and what not revealed yet) and arrested the suspect -- what a great finish.

It will be so interesting to learn more about the details of this person and his life for the last 40 years or so. This case has already encouraged the hope that other DNA assisted arrests in all sorts of cases can be achieved via follow up using DNA samples already in existence.

As I have mentioned many times in recent posts -- I have tested with four DNA testing companies and have used the features of gedmatch as well.

If you add up the matches for these companies, I have over 9000 matches.

It is overwhelming to try to figure how most of these matches fit into the family tree.

Partly, because so many of the matches show NO family trees posted or that they are private which requires communication which often results in no responses . . .

Very few of the matches share my surname and so that adds to the frustration as well

In the coming time, I look forward to a better way of dealing with so many "possible" close relatives being identified and how they are connected to me.

It is really that I'm not doing nothing about DNA matches.

I am slowly trying to go through the lists of current folks and grab some of the promising looking daily new ones as well.

I know that there have been several relatives from the tree that have recently submitted their DNA samples and I look forward to seeing those results too. Right now there are "sales" on from several of the companies and that makes it a good time to test.

And lastly, keepin' it "all DNA" today:

So, that is a bit of our week, see you all "in a few" ! 👨👩