Ten cells are enough to tell someone apart from anyone else, Italian researchers say.
''We analysed the DNA on 24 different genome clusters and identified the ten unequivocal cells,'' said lead researcher Giuseppe Novelli of Rome's Ter Vergata University.
''The ten cells are all you need to provide conclusive evidence of a person's identity,'' he said.
''We have confirmed our results using DNA fragments from 1,000 individuals of various ethnic backgrounds,'' Novelli told the BMC Genomics journal.
Novelli stressed the information on the master genes could not tell anything else about people other than who they were.
''The information encoded in these genes has nothing whatsoever to do with genetic sequences companies are interested in for various reasons,'' he assured BMC Genomics.
