Paternity: Paternity tests and Dna testing information

Parental testing From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia A maternity or paternity identification test is conducted to establish whether a person is the biological parent of another person. A test to prove paternity (whether a man is someone's father) is known as a paternity test; a test to prove maternity (whether a woman is someone's mother) is called a maternity test. Although paternity tests are more common than maternity tests, there may be circumstances in which the biological mother of the child is unclear. Examples include cases of an adopted child attempting to reunify with his or her biological mother, potential hospital mix-ups, and in vitro fertilization where the laboratory may have implanted an unrelated embryo inside the mother. Other factors such as new laws regarding reproductive technologies using donated eggs and sperm and surrogate mothers can mean that the female giving birth is not necessarily the legal mother of the child. For example, in Canada, the federal Human Assisted Reproduction Act provides for the use of hired surrogate mothers. The legal mother of the child may, in fact, be the egg donor. Similar laws are in place in the United Kingdom and Australia. Although not constituting completely reliable evidence, several congenital traits such as attached earlobes, the widow's peak, or the cleft chin, may serve as tentative indicators of (non-)parenthood as they are readily observable and inherited via autosomal-dominant genes. A more reliable way to ascertain parenthood is via DNA analysis (known as genetic fingerprinting of individuals), although older methods have included ABO blood group typing, analysis of various other proteins and enzymes, or using HLA antigens. The current techniques for paternity testing are using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP). For the most part however, DNA has all but taken over all the other forms of testing. Genetic testing has a 99.999% accuracy rate, or 99,999 out of 100,000 for the case where DNA samples of mother, child and the two disputed fathers are available.[1]