Pirouz Emami
400088956
In the Gattaca movie produced in a 1997, many futuristic technologies regarding that time has been shown. Now is 20 years past the time that the movie was initially released and we are using some concept technologies used in the movies such as electric cars. One of the futuristic technologies showed in the movie was the rapid identification of people from their genetics. The question is have we discovered a method to identify a person from his DNA as shown in the movie?
In the movie, each time the main character, Vincent, was entering the Gattaca facility, he was going through some processes for his identity verification. They were gates that required the people to place his finger on the designated pad to verify the identity. The device identified the person using the blood droplet taken from
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This device has the capacity to sequence between 10 to 20 giga base pairs in 48 hours (“Oxford Nanopre Technologies”, 2017). Despite being fast this device has high rate of error. In study done by Zaaijer et al. (2017), researchers developed a technique to re-identify human samples using MinION with high accuracy rate. To achieve a high accuracy rate of %99.9 percent, they developed a Bayesian algorithm that computes a posterior probability that the sketch matches the database or does not match. Using this technique they could identify samples based on 3-13 minute of the sequencing and 60-300 informative single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Although this technique is fast and autonomous in sequencing, the sample required to be prepared using prep kit which takes about 55 minutes and requires human intervention. Also, the database used in this paper was only consist of 31000 individuals, which is about %0.0005 of the world population. Larger database increases the identification