Suspicious Minds
R. Annie Gough in Injury Illustrated, 2020
An autopsy technician assists the medical examiner in the actual autopsy procedures. This was not a funeral home or a police department basement. This was a state-of-the-art forensic science center, complete with multiple autopsy bays, evidence labs, firearms and ballistic specialists, and toxicology mass spectrometers. The staff included several medical scene investigators, two medical examiners who were forensic pathologists (MDs) and also served the duty of coroner, four autopsy technicians, and countless toxicology scientists and trace specialists. The forensic science center was equipped for DNA analysis and other trace-evidence testing. Possible evidence could include tiny droplets of blood, a single hair, cigarette butts, a licked stamp, skin cells on clothing, worn jewelry, old stains, and other degraded tissues. New employees had to run tests and train technicians on the trace equipment. As a result of test training, my DNA is now registered in the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), which is the database used to detect or exclude individuals from crime scenes. They have my dental x-rays, too, but that is a different story.
Where's my kit? An overview of attrition in sexual assault cases
Rachel E. Lovell, Jennifer Langhinrichsen-Rohling in Sexual Assault Kits and Reforming the Response to Rape, 2023
Simultaneously, understanding of DNA technology had started to improve, making it possible to scientifically demonstrate sexual contact in some cases (see Chapter 16). The power of DNA evidence increased in 1994 with the advent of Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), a database of DNA samples which aided law enforcement in the identification and exclusion of suspects. It also broke down the barriers of jurisdictional communication by conducting comparisons across time and place and identifying previously unknown patterns of offending through forensic hits (R. Campbell et al., 2020).
Medicolegal Investigation of Deaths
Kevin L. Erskine, Erica J. Armstrong in Water-Related Death Investigation, 2021
DNA profiles can be entered into the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), a national database of DNA profiles from convicted offenders, missing persons, and material recovered from crime scenes, to assist in the identification of suspects or victims or in the linkage of crimes based on the finding of identical profiles at multiple scenes.5 DNA profiles can also be entered into local database systems as well. DNA comparison is also used to establish or confirm paternity, maternity, or other genetic relationship, such as between siblings.
Multiple genetic analyses for Chinese Hunan Han population via 46 A-STRs
Published in Annals of Human Biology, 2022
Yunying Zhang, Yating Fang, Man Chen, Ming Zhao, Hui Xu, Congying Zhao, Jiangwei Lan, Bofeng Zhu
Short tandem repeats (STRs), also known as microsatellite DNA or simple sequence repeats, are the common kind of length polymorphisms, typically consisting of 2–6 bp tandem repeat units, which are widely found in eukaryotic genomes. Ever since their discovery in the early 1980s, STRs have gradually caught researchers’ eyes in many fields due to a great many noticeable advantages, such as high polymorphism, high heterozygosity, easy standardisation, and so on. Intensive studies (Ellegren 2004; Butler 2006) were conducted to reveal genetic and genomic information of STRs, which provided robust evidence to indicate that STRs were highly polymorphic for parentage testing and individual identification in forensic practice. What’s more, the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) program supported by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, containing original 13 core loci (Budowle et al. 1998) and seven newly expanded loci (Butler and Hill 2012; Hares 2015), generalised and facilitated forensic applications of STR markers greatly. Nowadays, the aforementioned STR loci are commonly included in various commercial kits for forensic applications and do help resolve most routine cases. However, the discrimination powers of CODIS-based STR kits are sometimes inadequate in terms of complicated kinship analyses and cases with STR mutations. It has been proven that non-CODIS STRs could deal with complicated cases for biological relationship more effectively in some situations (Tsai et al. 2013), which implied that non-CODIS loci should be complementary to CODIS STRs to strengthen complex case-solving capability.
Genetic variation and differentiation among a native British and five migrant South Asian populations of the East Midlands (UK) based on CODIS forensic STR loci
Published in Annals of Human Biology, 2020
Ella Jane Brearley, Puneetpal Singh, Jasvinder Singh Bhatti, Sarabjit Mastana
The original FBI Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) nationwide DNA database focussed on the analysis of 13 STR loci. These are commonly utilised for human identity testing both in forensic casework and paternity, mainly due to availability within many commercial human identification kits (Butler 2006). The CODIS loci contained in AmpFISTR® Profiler PlusTM and AmpFISTR® COfilerTM kits (Applied Biosystems, Foster City, CA, USA) included the autosomal tetranucleotide loci D3S1358, D8S1179, D21S11, D18S51, D5S818, D13S317, D7S820, D16S539, vWA, TPOX, FGA, CSF1PO and TH01. The Amelogenin locus is also included in these kits for sex/gender identification. These loci (except D5S818 and CSF1PO) are located on different chromosomes, therefore are independently inherited. These loci are non-coding, disease-free markers used solely for forensic applications.
Genetic polymorphism and forensic efficiency of 21 autosomal STR loci from Shandong Han population in Northern China
Published in Annals of Human Biology, 2023
Qi Liu, Yawen Han, Xiudi Hou, Shuquan Zhao, Dan Wang, Shuyue Li, Yequan Wang
Short tandem repeats (STRs), as the most important genetic markers, have been widely used in paternity testing and individual identification (Butler 2007; Ziętkiewicz et al. 2012). Many commercial STR multiplex amplification kits targeting the new Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) STR core loci proposed by CODIS Core Loci Working Group are suitable for applications in forensics (Hares 2012, 2015; Lian et al. 2016; He et al. 2018; Zhang et al. 2019). However, in some cases, including duo parentage analyses in which samples from the father or mother are lacking, complex kinship cases, and cases with STR mutations, a larger number of STR loci is needed for accurate identification. So additional STR loci independent of those in the current CODIS system are needed as supplementary tools. Some population data for various non-CODIS systems have been reported (Shen et al. 2013; Song et al. 2014; Li et al. 2018). However, the Shandong Han population has not been evaluated using the commercially available Goldeneye™ DNA ID 22NC Kit (PeopleSpot Inc., Beijing, China), which simultaneously amplifies 21 autosomal STR loci, including four CODIS loci (D1S1656, D2S441, D10S1248, and D3S1358) and 17 non-CODIS loci (D4S2366, D6S477, D22GATA198B05, D15S659, D8S1132, D3S3045, D14S608, D17S1290, D3S1744, D18S535, D13S325, D7S1517, D10S1435, D11S2368, D19S253, D7S3048, and D5S2500). We performed the first investigation of allele frequencies and forensic parameters of 21 autosomal STR loci among 523 unrelated healthy Chinese Han individuals living in Shandong, Northern China, using the Goldeneye™ DNA ID 22NC Kit. Our results provide basic STR population data for forensic assays in the region and phylogenetic analyses.
Related Knowledge Centers
- Allele
- Copy Number Variation
- DNA Database
- Microsatellite
- Mitochondrial DNA
- Nucleotide
- Zygosity
- Locus
- Y-Str
- Base Pair