Sometime in the future, technicians will go over the scene of the crime. They'll uncover some DNA evidence and take it to the lab. And when the cops need to get a picture of the suspect, they won't have to ask eyewitnesses to give descriptions to a sketch artist - they'll just ask the technicians to get a mugshot from the DNA.

That, at least, is the potential of new research being published today in PLOS Genetics. In that paper, a team of scientists describe how they were able to produce crude 3D models of faces extrapolated from a person's DNA.

"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 wrote in their paper. "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."

DNA face reconstruction
© Shriver Claes/Penn State

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. All of these factors were then used to develop statistical models to approximate a facial structure from DNA.

Of course, the process at this point is far from perfect, and there are plenty of obstacles in the way. This study is only for a limited set of genes and populations, and of course, there are many other factors that go into what a face looks like beyond mere genes, such as age and weight.

As the researchers note in the paper, "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." Still, they add, "these results provide both the impetus and analytical framework for these studies."

Which means that until its shown that there is a general way to reconstruct faces from DNA (and it may turn out that there isn't), cops will still have to find suspects in old-fashioned ways. But if this research pans out, it will provide one more tool that law enforcement can use to accurately determine who might have committed a crime.

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