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Comment by suprnurd | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of crazy that we can pull Beethoven’s health history and even family secrets? out of a few strands of hair...

Particularly since cut hair doesn't even contain DNA. Or at least that's what is claimed by random web sites if you ask a search engine. Never mind a full genomic analysis, even for forensic purposes it is claimed that you need hair with the follicle attached. Is that still true, or is that claim now out of date, I wonder.

It does seem like the state of the art differs from popular understanding. Not only is mitochondrial DNA straight forward (although not especially useful for forensics as it is maternal), but with specialized extraction it is still possible to recover nuclear DNA, just exceedingly painful to do so.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978032399...

Gattaca did portray hair as being more than enough for forensics. (“Keep your lashes on your lids where they belong. How could you be so careless?”)

Well, they managed to analyze DNA from centuries-old hair in this paper.

From the methods section:

> Nuclear DNA in hair has an extremely low average fragment length owing to the activity of endonucleases expressed during hair formation.

But the researchers made adjustments for that during sample prep before sequencing, and alignment after sequencing.

Musical gholas inbound.

Time to re-watch Starman (:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starman_(film)

There's a Starman waiting in the sky. He'd like to come and meet us;

...and so on.

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