According to sources close to the investigation, there are concerns that DNA recovered from Nancy Guthrie's home may not yield a usable profile for comparison.

For many years, researchers believed that the DNA inside a newly fertilized egg began as a structural ‘blank slate’ – a loose, unorganized mass that would only take shape once the embryo started using its own genes. In this view, order emerged only after the genetic program switched on.

A new study suggests that inherited traits explain a small but measurable share of why some people relocate far from where they were born.

For decades, scientists viewed the genome of a newly fertilized egg as a structural "blank slate"—a disordered tangle of DNA waiting for the embryo to wake up and start reading its own genetic instructions.