THE unique temperature at which a given fragment of DNA unwinds could be used to speed up identification of suspects at police stations and allow hair samples and other evidence to be profiled at the scene of the crime.
Forensic scientists create a DNA profile of an individual from a sample of saliva or hair by extracting the DNA and making multiple copies of the short tandem repeats, or STRs, at 13 signature regions on the human genome. STRs are typically two to five base pairs long and are repeated many times head to tail, as in GACT-GACT-GACT. What differs…
