Interrogation of short tandem repeats using fluorescent probes and melting curve analysis: A step towards rapid DNA identity screening

Current forensic DNA profiling methods rely on the analysis of samples at specialised laboratories with an average turnaround time of several days. The ability to rapidly determine a partial profile of short tandem repeats at the point-of-arrest would be of great benefit to police forces around the world, for example enabling a suspect to be rapidly included or excluded from an investigation. We have developed a homogeneous PCR method for the interrogation of STR loci utilising fluorescent oligonucleotide probes and melting curve analysis. Alleles of the D18S51, TH01 and D8S1179 loci were differentiated and identified on the basis of target length and probe melting temperature. Assay performance was evaluated by comparing melting peak data with the AmpFlSTR^® SGM Plus^® system. The method is compatible with direct analysis of unpurified buccal swab samples, enabling a partial STR profile to be generated within 1 h.     

Quiescent Leviathan? Citizenship and National Security Measures in Late Modernity

The systematic study of political trials and national security measures tends to be associated with the old-fashioned genre of ‘state trials’. Although whiggish or critical reductionism has since tended to prevail, recent social historical work on protest movements, ideology, and rights struggles opens up fresh approaches. The current scholarly shift of attention away from the repressive powers of the state to plural sites of power, while representing an advance, also threatens to relegate the area to neglect. The modern renewal of national security measures can in fact be seen as part of a more complex deployment of law and linked to current debates around state formation, governmentality, and citizenship. As the late modern state is eroded from above by globalization, and from below by demands of identity politics and differentiated citizenship, will such repressive measures be revealed as an anachronism or continue as a final resource of the state in crisis?     

Inca, Sailor, Soldier, King: Gregor MacGregor and the Early Nineteenth‐Century Caribbean

This article examines the recruiting practices, political propositions and changing identities of the Scottish adventurer Gregor MacGregor in the early nineteenth‐century Caribbean. Based on original archival research and revision of the existing secondary literature, it seeks to understand why he has consistently been judged as a failure, and why neither Scotland nor any of the countries MacGregor worked in have wanted to claim him as their own hero. After an introduction providing biographical details and some historical context for the Caribbean in the period 1811–1830, the article looks in detail at what have been seen to be his successes and failures in the Caribbean region. It asks to what extent questions of ethnicity or masculinity have affected the way contemporaries and historians viewed MacGregor and his actions. In conclusion, it suggests that although he was a soldier and a sailor, and he was declared both an Inca and a King, his career was deemed a failure by both contemporaries and historians in Scotland, South America and the Caribbean. The main explanation for this negative assessment is that his ambitions continually fell foul of the interests of various Caribbean elites and of the distinctive historical circumstances of the region.¹     

Warranted and Unwarranted Complexity in the U.S. Sentencing Guideline

The U.S. Sentencing Guidelines are highly complex because of both initial policy decisions and subsequent pressures from Congress and appellate courts. The two initial policy decisions that were largely responsible for this complexity were (a) basing guidelines on "relevant conduct" rather than on the offense of conviction and (b) specifying in detail the number and precise sentencing value of aggravating and mitigating factors. Given this initial bias toward specificity, it was inevitable that the complexity in the guidelines would become worse as Congress pressed for further distinctions and the Sentencing Commission responded to those statutory actions. The complexity of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines has detrimental effects on both the perceived and actual fairness of the laws. Although statistical analyses indicate that the most complex guidelines (as indexed by the length of each guideline, the length of application notes for each guideline, and the number of amendments to each guideline) are also those that are most frequently used, there is also evidence that at least some of the complexity in the guidelines (the number of specific offense characteristics in each guideline and the number of cross references) is unwarranted.     

Ethics and education for the public service in a liberal state

Graduate programs in public policy offer a variety of ethics courses focusing on framework theories, topical applications, and duties of office. Brown gives four reasons for making these types of courses an integral part of education for public service: they provide a common civic vocabulary; they give an essential perspective on analytical techniques; they challenge students' own presuppositions about public policy; and they help distinguish between empirical and conceptual issues. He argues that the growing emphasis in the policy programs on public management further enhances the importance of education in ethics, and that the current dearth of such courses in some programs seriously impedes their graduates.     

Characterization of human DNA in environmental samples

Environmental samples from indoor surfaces can be confounded by dust, which is composed largely of human skin cells and has been documented to contain roughly tens of micrograms of total DNA per gram of dust. This study complements previous published work by providing estimates of the quantity of amplifiable human DNA found in environmental samples from a typical indoor environment, categorized by the intensity of human traffic and visible quantity of dust. Dust was collected by surface swabbing standard 576 cm² areas in eight locations, and evaluated for total DNA quantity, presence of human DNA (mitochondrial and nuclear loci using conventional PCR), quantity of human nuclear DNA using quantitative PCR, and STR analysis. The total DNA content of 36 dust samples ranged from 9 to 28 ng/cm², and contained 0.2–1.1 pg/cm² of human DNA. Overall, human DNA was detected in 97% of 36 dust samples and 61% of samples yielded allele distributions of varying degrees of complexity when subjected to STR analysis. The implications of this study are twofold. First, the presence of dust in evidence can be a significant contamination source in forensic investigations because the human DNA component is of sufficient quality and quantity to produce allele calls in STR analysis. This can be effectively managed by implementing stringent protocols for collection and analysis of potential biological samples. A second implication is the use of dust as a source of evidence for identification of inhabitants within a defined location. In the latter case, a number of additional studies would be necessary to identify relevant pretreatments for environmental dust samples and to develop the necessary deconvolution techniques to separate the composite genotypes obtained.