In research with implications for forensics and genealogy, scientists here have been developing techniques that may allow police to work out a person's surname
LONDON: In research with implications for forensics and genealogy, scientists here have been developing techniques that may allow police to work out a person's surname from the DNA alone.
The techniques are being developed at the University of Leicester, where the revolutionary technique of genetic fingerprinting was invented by Sir Alec Jeffreys.
Doctoral research by Turi King has shown that men with the same British surname are highly likely to be genetically linked. The results of her research have implications in the fields of forensics, genealogy, epidemiology and the history of surnames.
King recruited over 2,500 men bearing over 500 different surnames to take part in the study carried out in Professor Mark Jobling's lab with the research exploring the potential link between surname and Y chromosome type.
"In Britain, surnames are passed down from father to son. A piece of our DNA, the Y chromosome, is the one part of our genetic material that confers maleness and is passed, like surnames, from father to son," King said.
"Therefore, a link could exist between a man's surname and the type of Y chromosome he carries. A simple link between name and Y chromosome could in principle connect all men sharing a surname into one large family tree.
"However, in reality the link may not be so clear cut. Hereditary surnames in Britain are many hundreds of years old and each name may have had several founders. Events such as adoptions, name-changes and non-paternities would confuse any simple genetic link.
"These days, using genetic techniques, it is possible to tell Y chromosomes apart from one another so we wondered if you might find that a particular surname was associated with a particular Y chromosome type."
King said there were a number of factors which could break the link between surnames and Y chromosome type: for example, there could have been more than one person, known as a surname founder, who took on a surname at the time of surname formation around 700 years ago.
"On the other hand, for rarer names, there may have been just one founder for the name and potentially all men who bear that surname today would be descended from him and could be connected into one large family tree," she said.
"The link between surname and Y chromosome type could be broken through events such as adoption or illegitimacy: in this instance, a male child would have one man's surname but another man's Y chromosome type. Given all this, we really didn't know if a link would exist."
The research showed that between two men who share the same surname, there is a 24% chance of sharing a common ancestor through that name but this increases to nearly 50% if the surname they have is rare.
King then went on to look at 40 surnames in depth by recruiting many different men all bearing the same surname, making sure that she excluded known relatives.
Surnames such as Attenborough and Swindlehurst showed that over 70% of the men shared the same or near identical Y chromosome types whereas surnames such as Revis, Wadsworth and Jefferson show more than one group of men sharing common
ancestry but unrelated to other groups.
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