Issue date: 11/7/07 Section: News

Media Credit: Kyle Hampton Maria Burchett, senior biological science major, shows off her sample field kit. The kit includes trace DNA samples of hair, blood and a cheek swab. [Click to enlarge]

Sacramento State biological science professor Ruth Ballard and her team of nine students recently completed their work on a DNA database. The database was requested by members of the Tanzanian government and is expected to help solve the country's paternity issues, as well as crimes like rape, murder and theft.

Ballard said the Tanzanian database will be featured in the Journal of Forensic Sciences in January.

Sac State is currently the home of a two-tiered program consisting of an overseas research project in Tanzania and a program called Crime Scene Investigation - Training and Research for Undergraduates or CSI - TRU, which is intended to train students planning to pursue a career in forensics.

California State University, San Jose as part of a collaboration with CSU Los Angeles and CSU Fresno.

Ballard said she got the idea to create a Tanzanian database in 2001 when she went on a climbing expedition to Mt. Kilimanjaro with one of her graduate students. While visiting, the two realized there were still a lot of tribes with unstudied DNA markers. They both agreed that further research was necessary.

While Ballard only intended to research the tribes and their DNA markers, the Tanzanian government asked her to develop a database for the entire country.

"It was a bigger project than I first imagined," Ballard said. "The government wanted me to leave their country a legacy."

Ballard and her team created two databases,
one for interbreeding tribes and another for independent tribes such as the Maasai and the Meru. These tribes are described as "reproductively isolated" because they "solely marry within their own tribes."

"We would go out on 'saliva safaris' in a great, big vehicle for the day," Ballard
said. "We took over 1000 samples from many different tribes."

The researchers collected, extracted and separated the DNA samples at the Muhumbili College of Health Sciences in Tanzania. The samples were then brought back to Sac State where they were analyzed and quantified. DNA fragments of the samples then determine
DNA profiles for each individual.

By looking at repetitive patterns in profiles, the researchers were able to determine the frequencies of markers in the population.

"It was a huge eye-opening experience for students to be living in a third world country like Dar es Salaam; there were mobs of people everywhere, trying to sell things," Ballard said. "It's overwhelming and hard to know what to do...doing research work really changes you."

Many of the student researchers said the experience was "life-changing."

Sac State alumnus Kraig Brustad said being
involved in the research project was a positive experience for him.

"First and foremost, my experiences rewarded me with an increased awareness to the depth and breadth of humanity and the common threads that so beautifully interconnect us all," he said. "Through my experiences, my respect for community was not only reaffirmed and deepened, but most significantly, it was fostered into reaching beyond a local level to the global level."

The researchers were looking for the marker frequencies for each tribal population.

Due to population differences, the markers help determine DNA for the target populations.

The research project was funded by the National Science Foundation, which donated
a $100,000 grant.

Ballard said, "$75,000 was used to buy the essential 3-10 Genetic Analyzer, which organizes DNA sequences and creates DNA profiles."

Sac State's on-campus Research and Creative Activities Program, which funds instructional-related activities, provided students with airfare money.

The CSU Program for Education and Research
in Biotechnology, an agency which funds biotechnology research throughout the CSU system, also donated to the project, as did the California Department of Justice and the Sacramento County Crime Lab.

Ballard said the project is now in its capacity building phase. This means that programs that help aid Third World countries become more independent are now in place.

The team's next goal involves building a new forensics laboratory in Tanzania so Tanzanian researchers can update their database independently without the need for outside help. The database will play a huge role in helping Tanzanian people with their paternity issues, Ballard said.

"Due to increasing industrial growth, many Tanzanian men have moved to other cities to find jobs. In the process, most have left their wives and children behind," Ballard said. "These women and their children are left in abject poverty and are desperate for the ability to force the men to pay for their kids. It's a bad situation...the women want it solved."

Ballard, along with agencies that help women and children rise above poverty, is working on trying to make the paternity test affordable and accessible to all women.

If the government enforces the paternity law in a stricter manner, the goal of making the test more readily available for women will be possible.

Following her involvement in the project, Ballard developed a new course and helped create a new bioscience major concentration, forensic technology.

Amber Kantner can be reached at akantner@statehornet.com.


Click here to read more about the Sacramento State CSI program.

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