You can know the age by means of blood

• May 10, 2024

Did you know that it is possible calculate the age of an individual through his blood ?, a group of scientists developed a test for this purpose.

This method can be very useful in the area forensic to determine the age of a suspect, a criminal or an unidentified dead person.

The technique is based on the identification of a characteristic of a type of immune cells , called T cells, which are transported in the blood .

These cells play a key role in the recognition of foreign "invaders" in the organism, such as bacteria, viruses, parasites or cancer cells .

As part of the process that these cells use to recognize the invaders, it is to produce small molecules of DNA circular.

The number of these molecules, known as cleavage circles of T-cell receptors, decreaseshey at a steady pace with age .

According to the scientists, the study shows that this biological phenomenon can be used to calculate "with precision Y reliability "The age of a human individual.

Unknown people

This approach, say the researchers, will place an individual in a generational category that extends in about 20 years.

The prediction of "phenotypes "Humans, the external characteristics of a person such as hair and eye color, from DNA information is a new emerging field in forensic science.

But currently, with DNA information, only a few characteristics of phenotypes can be identified with enough precision to have practical implications.

As the doctor explains Manfred Kayser, who led the study, the new test has proven to be the most accurate of all the analyzes that have been designed to calculate a human phenotype characteristic from DNA information.

"The conventional DNA profiles applied to the forensic science, they can only identify people who are already known by the research organizations ", explains the scientist.

"Therefore, each forensic laboratory has found cases in which the DNA profile obtained from the evidence material does not correspond to any of the suspects analyzed or to anyone in the criminal DNA database."

"In those cases, it is expected that the information that emerges from the evidence material will help find unknown persons," he adds.

Experts hope that the new test, along with the methods currently used to reconstruct the appearance of unknown people from a biological sample found at the crime scene, will eventually help resolve more cases.

The details of the research, carried out at the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands, are published in the journal Current Biology.

Source: BBC World

Video Medicine: What Your Blood Type Says About Your Personality (May 2024).