Scientists discover ways to restore faces from DNA

Scientists believe that DNA evidence found at a crime scene could in the future be used to create mugshots of criminal suspects, the Daily Mail reported, citing a new research paper published in PLOS Genetics.

In the article, entitled Modeling 3D Facial Shape From DNA, a team of scientists explained how they were able to produce crude 3D models of faces simply from people's DNA samples.

“We show that facial variation with regard to sex, ancestry, and genes can be systematically studied with our methods, allowing us to lay the foundation for predictive modeling of faces,” the researchers write.

“Such predictive modeling could be forensically useful; for example, DNA left at crime scenes could be tested and faces predicted in order to help to narrow the pool of potential suspects.”

To arrive at their facial reconstructions from DNA, the researchers looked at the genes that seem to correlate with facial structures, the facial structures of the people with those genes, and then asked people outside of their research group to characterize facial structures along different axes, reports Forbes.

These factors were then used to develop statistical models to approximate a facial structure from DNA.

For their research, the scientists chose to measure face shape in population samples with mixed West African and European ancestry from three locations - the United States, Brazil, and Cape Verde.

This technique is very much in its infancy at present, but the scientists believe that with future research it has the potential to becoming a major breakthrough in understanding the relationship between DNA and the face.

“Much more work is needed before we can know how many genes will be required to estimate the shape of a face in some useful way and many more populations need to be studied before we can know how generalizable the results are,” wrote the researchers.

“These results provide both the impetus and analytical framework for these studies.”

In time however DNA evidence could replace cops asking eyewitnesses to give descriptions to a sketch artist and instead they will ask the technicians to create a mugshot from DNA found at a crime scene.

The same discovery could also be used to predict the facial features of descendants, deceased ancestors, and even extinct human species.