Forensic biology

The Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate has tested Rapid DNA at mass fatality incident response exercises since 2015. This was done to determine the technology’s ability and usefulness in identifying victims of mass disasters. This webinar will review the successes and challenges from those exercises as well as discuss Rapid DNA’s most recent role in identifying victims of the 2018 Camp Fire in Butte County, CA.

This webinar was presented by the NIJ Forensic Technology Center of Excellence on May 2, 2019.

Forensic science research and development plays a key role in the advancement of the practice of forensic science, as noted by the 2009 National Academies of Science report “Strengthening Forensic Sciences in the United States: A Path Forward.”

This webinar was presented by the NIJ Forensic Technology Center of Excellence on April 9, 2019.

SWGDAM recently issued recommendations on genotyping results reported as likelihood ratios, designed to promote consistency among laboratories. Members of the committee will discuss the recommendations and their foundations.

This webinar was presented by the NIJ Forensic Technology Center of Excellence on October 18, 22018.

This webinar will provide an evaluation of the DEPArray™, a system that enables the identification, separation, and recovery of single cells or groups of cells from heterogeneous mixtures. The workflow described in this webinar will highlight the impact this instrument, with standard forensic processes, will have on processing sexual assault evidence and improving the success of single cell analyses.

Many working with genomic DNA can afford to lose large portions of it during its extraction without negatively impacting downstream analysis.  However, with work targeting highly degraded DNA sources, retention of every molecule can be key to successful analyses.   This webinar addressed the insufficient documentation of absolute efficiencies of extraction methods and the nature of DNA loss associated with the study of low copy number and degraded DNA samples.

This webinar highlighted the results of a full developmental validation of a method that estimates the A Posteriori Probability (APP) of the number of contributors in a DNA sample(NOC), and demonstrated that estimating the APP based on peak heights outperforms methods that rely on binary determinations alone. This presentation focused on including the true NOC in Likelihood Ratio interpretations and on repeatability.

This webinar was presented by the NIJ Forensic Technology Center of Excellence on July 14, 2020.

Improving the overall response to sexual assault includes understanding how touch DNA evidence impacts groping sexual assault cases. This webinar will illustrate the importance of these cases and highlight proposed guidelines for evidence collection.

This webinar was presented by the NIJ Forensic Technology Center of Excellence on February 27, 2019.

This webinar built on the concepts presented in the webinar “The Time to Collect is Now: DNA Evidence in Groping Sexual Assault Cases” presented by Dr. Julie Valentine.

In this webinar we discussed the theory and development of Investigative Genetic Genealogy, including some ethical and legal considerations raised by this technique.  Additionally, we explored the current status of case investigations, the impact on crime laboratories, implementation strategies, and recommendations for jurisdictions considering applying Investigative Genetic Genealogy to their unsolved cases.

This webinar was presented by the NIJ Forensic Technology Center of Excellence on January 23, 2020. 

Molecular identification is advantageous for medicolegal death investigations involving entomological activity. This enables species-level identification of immature specimens necessary for estimating post-mortem interval and may be performed without specialized training or resources. The presenter describes a strategy effective for relevant species and demonstrates analysis of casework-type samples.

This webinar was presented by the NIJ Forensic Technology Center of Excellence on December 2, 2021.

Microhaplotypes (microhaps) are biomarkers fewer than 300 nucleotides long that display multiple allelic combinations. The main advantages of microhaps over conventional short tandem repeats (STRs) include the 1) absence of stutter, 2) same-size alleles within each locus, 3) lower mutation rate, and 4) ancestry informative alleles. These forensically relevant loci can yield a power of discrimination similar to STRs while enhancing human identification (HID), mixture deconvolution, and biogeographic ancestry prediction.