There has been an interesting discussion on jtrforums about the "Eddowes" DNA match. Further revelations are promised about Dr Louhelainen's response to the one person at the Salisbury meeting who asked him about the 314.1C error in the DNA analysis:
But I do feel that there's a danger of getting away from the central point, what with all the emphasis on who said what to whom, what they might have meant by it, and what responsibility people might or might not have if other people quoted their mistaken work in a book without their knowledge - most of it highly hypothetical.
I think the thing we mustn't lose sight of as Ripperologists is the information we need to know before we can begin to discuss whether there's anything significant about the match with the DNA of Catherine Eddowes's descendant:
(1) If the 314.1C error is corrected, can the other people who handled the shawl still be eliminated as a possible source of the DNA that was matched?
According to the book, this was done on the basis that the control samples from the other people who handled the shawl didn't have 314.1C: "One of these amplified mtDNA segments had a sequence variation which gave a match between one of the shawl samples and Karen Miller's DNA only; i.e. the DNA sequence retrieved from the shawl did not match with control reference sequences. This DNA alteration is known as global private mutation (314.1C) ..." [quoted from Dr Louhelainen's summary of the analysis]
But now we know 314.1C is not rare, but a misnomer for 315.1C, which is found in more than 99% of the population, it's almost certain that at least one of the control sequences would have had it. So can they still be eliminated?
(2) Without 314.1C/315.1C (mistakenly thought to be rare) what percentage of the population would agree with the "small segment" that the "Eddowes" match was based on?
It was one of seven segments from the hypervariable regions, and therefore probably contained only 100-200 base positions. The available data suggest that such a short sequence might well have been shared with quite a large percentage of the population.
But I do feel that there's a danger of getting away from the central point, what with all the emphasis on who said what to whom, what they might have meant by it, and what responsibility people might or might not have if other people quoted their mistaken work in a book without their knowledge - most of it highly hypothetical.
I think the thing we mustn't lose sight of as Ripperologists is the information we need to know before we can begin to discuss whether there's anything significant about the match with the DNA of Catherine Eddowes's descendant:
(1) If the 314.1C error is corrected, can the other people who handled the shawl still be eliminated as a possible source of the DNA that was matched?
According to the book, this was done on the basis that the control samples from the other people who handled the shawl didn't have 314.1C: "One of these amplified mtDNA segments had a sequence variation which gave a match between one of the shawl samples and Karen Miller's DNA only; i.e. the DNA sequence retrieved from the shawl did not match with control reference sequences. This DNA alteration is known as global private mutation (314.1C) ..." [quoted from Dr Louhelainen's summary of the analysis]
But now we know 314.1C is not rare, but a misnomer for 315.1C, which is found in more than 99% of the population, it's almost certain that at least one of the control sequences would have had it. So can they still be eliminated?
(2) Without 314.1C/315.1C (mistakenly thought to be rare) what percentage of the population would agree with the "small segment" that the "Eddowes" match was based on?
It was one of seven segments from the hypervariable regions, and therefore probably contained only 100-200 base positions. The available data suggest that such a short sequence might well have been shared with quite a large percentage of the population.
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