Is the "mother" alive? Or in the alternative, is there a source of "mother" DNA (ME's office, for example, will have retained tissue if there was an autopsy)? Nuclear DNA testing can provide the answer.
Each person has two alleles (or markers) which are independently inherited from their parents. All children of the same mother will have half their mother's DNA (although not necessarily the same half sibling to sibling). Thus, if you have an alleged parent's profile, you can compare each daughter to the mother to ensure that one allele is accounted for by 'mom' at each locus. Without mom DNA it gets trickier. If 'mom' has a profile of 6, 9.3, for example, one daughter could inherit the 6 and the other the 9.3, and a direct comparison therefore gets more challenging.
That said, siblings generally have more DNA in common than 1st cousins. You could do a test to determine the likelihood of first cousins versus siblings. First cousins will likely have some DNA in common (as their mothers likely have some DNA in common, as the odds of completely opposite recombinant DNA is pretty rare) but siblings will typically share more.
There are labs available for this type of testing, if you are of a mind.
Christine
--- In forensic-science@yahoogroups.com, "Gurl" <gekgal@...> wrote:
>
>
> Woman alleged to be the mother of two woman. However, siblings remember
> the possibility that the mother of one of the girls, was actually the
> sister of the alleged mother. That the "mother" took her sisters
> daughter and raised her as her own.
> Since mt-DNA follows the maternal line, how is one to be able to
> determine using DNA if the two woman are sisters?
> If the father is different (as I suspect would be the case) what other
> definitive evidence could be gather using DNA to determine if the woman
> are of the same mother?
> There is the possibility of gathering DNA from both "daughters" and a
> brother. Father is deceased.
>
> Thank you for your feedback. This has bothered me for far too many
> years and I need to find out what DNA tests could determine the truth.
>
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