The World's Premier Home Paternity Testing Service

A new film about Italian composer Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) has revealed that he may have a second living descendant, Nadia Manfredi, who has asked for a DNA test to find out the truth.

Puccini composed many of the frequently-performed operas in musicians’ standard repertoires today, including La Bohéme, Tosca, and Madama Butterfly. Like the passionate dramas his operas portrayed, his own life (particularly his love life) has not been bereft of intrigue. The new film, titled “Puccini e la Fanciulla” (Puccini and the Girl), which premiered at the Venice film festival, suggests he had an affair with a maidservant’s cousin, Giulia Manfredi. Manfredi’s granddaughter, Nadia Manfredi, is now seeking to prove this relationship through a DNA test.

In 1978, Simonetta Pucini, currently the only living heir to Puccini’s estate and legacy, won a legal battle to prove that she was the illegitimate daughter of Puccini’s son Antonio. She inherited most of his estate, including a villa in Torre del Lago, which is now a museum and archive. With the news of another possible new heir, she has asked local residents to sign a petition to protect his memory from what she dismisses as local gossip.

This week brings an interesting piece of news regarding doggie DNA testing. A town just east of Tel Aviv, Israel, is planning to use DNA testing to fight the problem of dog poop in public places. According to a news report, the city of Petah Tikva is requesting community residents to stop by and register their dog’s DNA sample with the municipal vet.

In return, dog owners who clean up and deposit their dog’s poop at designated containers will be rewarded with dog food coupons and toys for their pets after DNA testing has identified the owner. Those who do not clean up, and whose samples are matched to the registry, maybe subject to a municipal fine.

The plan, which is undergoing a 6-month trial, is currently voluntary and has received positive feedback from pet-owners so far, who in general want a clean neighborhood. If the trial succeeds, the city plans to make dog DNA registration mandatory.

Eye on DNA this week reported that Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert is among an elite group of people whose digitized DNA is being sent off into space for the project, Operation Immortality.

Conceived by Richard Garriot, whose claim to fame is creating the Tabula Rasa video game, the goal for the project is to “save a history of humanity’s greatest achievements, digitized human DNA, and personal messages from people all over the world.” This “saved game” is to be delivered and stored on the International Space Station on October 12 by Garriot himself.

Also sending in their digitized DNA are Silicon Valley celebrities Kevin Rose, creator of the social-bookmarking website Digg, Robert Scoble, one of the world’s most popular tech bloggers and Tim Draper, founder of the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

A New Scientist article reports on a study suggesting moms’ and dads’ facial features may influence a person’s choice for their mate.

Women tend to date guys that look like their fathers, but men tend to be attracted to women that look like their mothers. The Hungarian biologist Tamas Bereczkei observed 67 long-term couples and their parents, taking measurements of facial features such as the face length to width ratio, as well as nose and mouth dimensions.

According to the study’s results, the face of a woman’s boyfriend more closely resembles her father’s than the faces of other males in the study, particularly in measurements for features closer to the center of the face. Men, on the other hand, dated women whose lower facial features (jaw and lip area) tended to match those of their mothers.

Whether or not this is a function of genetics or environment (for example, if this phenomenon is observed in families with adopted children) is a question not addressed by the article, and a possibility for future study. Regardless, the findings of the study shows another reason for strong family resemblances.

As reported by The New York Times, two high school students embarked on a science project that revealed mislabeled or misrepresented fish found in restaurants and grocery stores in New York.

They used DNA testing to identify the different fish, and found that in 25% of the 60 fish tested, inexpensive fish were being sold as expensive fish. In one instance, a piece of sushi sold as the luxury treat white tuna turned out to be Mozambique tilapia, a much cheaper, farmed fish.

While the sample size in this project was too small to serve as incriminating evidence against the businesses in the area, the experiment serves as another example of the many possible uses of DNA testing today.

The series of widely spread news stories about a bigfoot find, which started earlier this month, came to definitive close when DNA test results released Friday on two submitted specimens revealed that one specimen was from a human and the other sample contained 96% opossum DNA.

The following Monday, reports revealed that the supposed bigfoot body, which was thawed out for further “investigation,” was indeed a rubber suit.

According to a Telegraph online article, a Spanish woman is seeking a posthumous DNA test on the famous 20th century artist Salvador Dali. The woman, identified only as Pilar A, claims that she is Dali’s illegitimate daughter, the product of an affair between the surrealist painter and Pilar’s mother, a maid at a home in the same town where Dali and his family lived.

After DNA tests on medical samples kept in storage after Dali’s death in 1989 proved inconclusive, additional DNA testing was carried out on the samples, but Pilar’s attorney says the results have not been released to her. “If necessary we will ultimately request the exhumation of his corpse,” the lawyer said in the article.

Salvado Dali was born in 1904 and was one of the most famous surrealist painters of the 20th century. His work was considered to be very imaginative and even strikingly bizarre, and his painting skills are said to have been heavily influenced by Renaissance masters. Dali’s paintings were and continue to be purchased and distributed by art connoisseurs from around the world.

Speaking of the great wealth she could stand to inherit if DNA proves Dali is in fact her father, Pilar A has said that her motivation lies not in the monetary compensation she could receive, but rather her “need to discover the true identity of my father.”

Even though the legendary Egyptian king has been dead for thousands of years, King Tutankhamun’s mummy is undergoing paternity tests to see if the mummified remains of two stillborn children found in his tomb are his offspring. According to a BBC online article, the British archaeologist who discovered King Tut’s tomb in 1922 found the fetuses then, but this is the first time scientists have attempted DNA paternity testing on the mummified tissue. Scientists will also compare the fetuses’ DNA to each other to determine if a sibling relationship exists, which will aid scientists in confirming both the fetuses’ paternity and maternity.

Scientists and scholars believe that the fetuses’ mother was King Tut’s only known wife, Ankhesenamum, daughter of the beautiful, legendary Queen Nefertiti. They hope that by identifying the relationship between the fetuses and King Tut they may eventually be able to locate Queen Nefertiti’s mummy, which has never been found.

King Tut ruled Egypt from 1333-1324 BC and rose to power around age 8 or 9. He died around a decade later and is believed to have had no surviving children. King Tut became famous around the world when his tomb was discovered by British explorer Howard Carter in 1922. Tut’s tomb was intact and contained immense amounts of gold and ebony treasures, as well as archeological finds like perfectly preserved bones and tissue of the king himself.

The DNA paternity tests will be performed at the Cairo School of Medicine.

According to a BBC online article published last week, scientists in the UK have examined the hairs from an unknown animal that some think may belong to the legendary Yeti, or ape-man, creature that has been known throughout Indian lore for years. According to many Indian villagers, legend has it that the 8-foot-tall “mande barung,” or “forest man,” lives deep in the Garo hills of Northeast India. Reported sightings of this half-man, half-ape creature over many generations have led many around the world to try to prove or disprove the yeti’s existence.

The scientists at Oxford Brookes University are using DNA testing and analysis to compare the strands of hair to several species of primates. They are also comparing these hairs, collected by a forester in 2003, to a hair sample collected by Sir Edmund Hillary in the early 1930s. So far, scientists have said the DNA analysis has been inconclusive, with no matches to existing species of animal so far.

While the legend of the yeti has sparked international debate, one thing is certain: DNA testing performed on hair strands can provide powerful scientific proof of a person or animal’s identity. In fact, scientists have been using hair to answer identity questions through DNA testing and analysis since the 1990s. DNA testing on hair is often used for identification purposes in forensic DNA tests, and can also be used to help determine biological relationships, like paternity.