Recently I had my STR results, kit number and surname written about on dna forums. It was some bull about the mythology of some ethnic group’s creation stories, nothing based on science, the dna itself or my specific results. I was momentarily incensed. I left my surname group at FTDNA upsetting the Administrator as I am the closest match to her paternal line. I deleted my Ysearch account. I have reversed these things but I intend to leave FTDNA permanently, have them totally delete my account by the end of 2012. Using surname projects and STR results for silly racist ideas is definitely beyond the pale. I will eventually delete my 23andMe account this year or the next. I think dna testing has had its day in the sun.

[a] HLA types are the names given to different haplotypes of the various genes in the HLA region. These are not easily determined by SNP typing, because the genes are too polymorphic – see e.g. http://www.ebi.ac.uk/imgt/hla/

[b] there are however several attempts ongoing to impute HLA types from SNPs on common GWAS chips – see e.g. https://oxfordhla.well.ox.ac.uk/hla/

[c] but, like the case at hand, these only really allow statistical conclusions, not ones that can be applied with confidence to a specific individual.

So where is the objectivity in this method finding ‘matching profiles’ instead of ‘criminals’? And what about degree of certainty over probability, does that even matter? Those are the objections at the root of whether using this as a resource for law enforcement is plausible or fallible- me being just a layperson and not a scientist/paid-professional.

Soliciting public DNA databases should only yield ‘probabilities’ for matches, not the certain answer of a committed crime. Mark Minick found this out in 2008; Google his name and how his DNA found its way into a DailyMail-UK article (although there are 15 other hits for Mark Minick in the U.S. so you never know!). Although I’m sure his DNA was drawn from a ‘localized’ pool (criminal one) he was still was found complicit to an event he did not take part of and paid the consequences nonetheless. And you feel it is a good idea to search ‘remote’ pools (such as ancestor/sibling profiles) and up the probabilities to incriminate a given profile to a match? That sounds like taking at face value your first course plot when navigating via dead-reckoning, you will only increase the degree of error to get to your final destination. Read commenter No. 5′s post.

If you want to bring to the table the positives or negatives of using public DNA as a ‘search’ tool, then you must objectively examine its true value to answering the given question, not whether it can answer it. Statistics can also yield answers, any of a thousand you wish… So when genealogists/paid-professionals such as Commenter No. 1 and No. 4 stop putting such smug feelings behind DNA being so wonderful at literally putting criminals and their brothers in jail so they can do cameo interviews in TruTV shows, then laypersons like us will not be so reticent to give out samples for things we want to consent to, like genealogy or genetic ailment tests or others- lest we also wind up like Mark Minick by proxy of increased probabilities within this method.

The seminal article on the subject (King & Jobling, 2009, “Founders, Drift,..”) found an inverse correlation between Y-DNA and surname frequency; the more common a surname, the less likely persons holding it will have a match. My own study of the sbject suggests that — while there is an association between surnnaem and Y-DNA — it is much less strong than commonly believed, including by DNA surname project administrators.

With common surnames, we often see those with very many matches. Even with high resolution and quallity, the surnames aren’t in high agreement.

King and Jobling did propose just this method for identifying criminals but, as their own data shows, it would work well only for rare surnames. It’s of limited usefulness.
-ralph taylor, Taylor Family Genes at FTDNA