Question

Page 1. The results shown below are from a paternity dispute involving a woman and the alleged father of one or more of her children. The southern blot shows a single-locus DNA fingerprint analysis performed on the mother, the alleged father, and the woman's four children: mother child 2l dailal tather dild4 a) Which children can possibly be offspring of the alleged father? child ild Explain. b) Are any of the children definitely NOT the alleged father's? Explain. c) what would you do as a forensic analyst in order to more definitively identify the children that were sired by this alleged father? 1 2 3 4 5 6

Answer 1

a. Children 1,3, and 4 could be possibly the children of this alleged father on the basis of the sequence similarities of DNA between them which is seen by the similarities of the fragments obtained in them.

b. Child 2 is not the son of this father as there is no fragment similar to his father though few sequences match his mother.

c. DNA polymorphisms used for paternity diagnosis are length polymorphisms of the highly polymorphic VNTR loci [variable number of tandem repeats] which are compared in most of the cases.