Murder Mystery

Intro

In order to gain a deeper understanding of forensic sciences, such as DNA Fingerprinting and chromatography, our class solved a mock murder mystery. With five suspects and one murder victim, we had to find as much evidence and motive possible to prove to a mock jury who is guilty and what of.


Evidence of Work

Crime Investigation Final Presentation

To display our evidence and findings in an organized way, we put it all into a power point. We decided that Sam Sophomore and Nancy Normal should be convicted of murder in the first degree.

Content

These are the concepts and topics that our project was supposed to educate us about. All of the vocabulary below was either processes we used, factors we looked at, or just things we needed to know in order to make a justified verdict.

  • DNA Profiling - A forensic technique in criminal investigations, comparing criminal suspects' profiles to DNA evidence so as to assess the likelihood of their involvement in the crime.
  • Fingerprint - Through fingerprint analyzation forensic scientists are able to see patterns within a specific fingerprint to then potentially match it to the suspects' in which they are analyzing. Fingerprints also helps investigators to track a suspects's record.
  • Karyotyping - The process of pairing and ordering all the chromosomes of an organism, thus providing a genome-wide snapshot of an individual's chromosomes. (In this project, we were able to identify chromosomal diseases that were present in both those in which we convicted).
  • Pedigrees - A diagram that depicts the biological relationships between an organism and its ancestors, that can also track genetic diseases within an ancestry.
  • Allele - The different types of one sort of gene.
  • Gene - The DNA coding for one trait.
  • Chromosome - Genetic information stored in a safe manner.
  • Phenotype - How the traits show up and are expressed.
  • Genotype - The genetic makeup of something.
  • Homozygous - When a genotype is composed o the same alleles.
  • Heterozygous - When a genotype has different alleles.
  • Dominant - If present, trait will always be expressed.
  • Recessive - trait must be dominant to be expressed.
  • Co Dominant - No dominant traits, so phenotype has both.
  • Incomplete Dominant - Phenotype is a mix of non dominant trait.
  • Genetic Variation - Differences of the same trait.
  • Haploid - A cell with one set of genetic material.
  • Diploid - A cell with two sets of the same genetic info

Ink chromatography is the process in which a solvent breaks up the ink from a pen or marker into its basic parts, allowing us to see the make up of the pen and better identify the differences to find out which pen was used in the crime.

Pedigrees were used to gain a better understanding of the relationships between the suspects and any connections to genetic diseases.

Karyotypes such as this one were used to identify chromosomal disorders that could add to motive such as XYY Syndrome displayed in the karyotype shown.

Conclusion

This has been one of my favorite projects so far. Even though it was a lot of tedious little experiments, it was overall fun because of the total goal and purpose. I believe this project was also beneficial not only to let us learn about science of course, but it gave us real life experience and insight into an actual profession which schools should do more often to help students gain a better understanding of life after high school. It also informed us about what forensic science really is rather than what movies and TV shows show us. I believe this project truly enlightened us students as people and has begun to open our minds to what our futures hold regarding our possible STEM based occupations.