Catch a killer with a single hair

Baskin Engineering professor Ed Green’s technique to extract DNA from hair samples may help solve thousands of cold cases. 

The method is an outgrowth of Green’s work with ancient DNA, which helped decode the Neanderthal genome from 40,000-year-old bone fragments. 

Paleogenomic and forensic research is limited by the quantity and quality of data that can be recovered from degraded organic remains. A major area of research in the UCSC Paleogenomics Lab run by Ed Green and partner Beth Shapiro is therefore to improve the recovery of authentic ancient DNA. Green was recently featured on ABC’s 2020; his segment begins around 1:06: Watch