A Promise Kept
Written by: Mark Desire, Assistant Director of Forensic Biology, City of New York Office of Chief Medical Examiner Twenty-five years have passed since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, yet the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) continues to make identifications and has never turned away from the families of the […]
Student Ambassador Poster Preview: Elizabeth Kowalcyzk on Low-Pass Whole-Genome Sequencing as a Cost-Effective Forensic Workflow
Elizabeth Kowalczyk expected that cutting the sequencing depth would cost her the data. It didn’t. Even at DNA inputs as low as 0.1 nanograms, her low-pass sequencing runs produced genotype accuracies above 99.8%. Her research asks whether whole-genome sequencing, usually run at a depth and price that puts it out of reach for many forensic […]
This Week in Forensic Science
No one has hours to scour the papers to keep up with the latest news, so we’ve curated the top news stories in the field of Forensic Science for this week. Here’s what you need to know to get out the door! Placer County Sheriff’s Department Leverages Othram’s Identity Inference Platform to Identify a 1994 John […]
Student Ambassador Poster Preview: Xiaomeng (Simone) Yang on Predicting Body Weight and Muscularity with MicroRNAs
Simone Yang’s data told her saliva samples were the weaker ones: lower sequencing quality, fewer usable reads than blood. Then the validation results came back, and saliva held the strongest, most consistent markers in the entire study. She’s investigating whether microRNAs, small molecules that shift with a person’s metabolism and physical activity, can predict body […]
This Week in Forensic Science
No one has hours to scour the papers to keep up with the latest news, so we’ve curated the top news stories in the field of Forensic Science for this week. Here’s what you need to know to get out the door! Lydia de Castro ’91, ’10: Using Forensic Science to Identify 9/11 Victims (John Jay […]
This Week in Forensic Science
No one has hours to scour the papers to keep up with the latest news, so we’ve curated the top news stories in the field of Forensic Science for this week. Here’s what you need to know to get out the door! Jackson County Medical Examiner’s Office & Kansas City Police Crime Laboratory Teams with Othram […]
Meet Your ISHI 37 Speakers: Jo Bright
Autosomal STR interpretation moved to probabilistic genotyping years ago. It’s now the standard in most U.S. labs. Y-STR interpretation didn’t make the same jump. Most labs still rely on database comparison and manual counting, even in the sexual assault cases where Y-STR is often the only way to pull a male profile out of a […]
Meet Your ISHI 37 Speakers: Kevin Lord
A SNP profile can upload cleanly to GEDmatch, clear every filter, and still be wrong. False-negative segments can knock a real relative off the match list entirely. False-positive segments can send an investigator chasing someone with no biological connection to the sample at all. Astrea Forensics has reanalyzed sequencing data originally generated by other labs […]
Meet Your ISHI 37 Speakers: Stacey Baker
In 2022, pieces of tissue started washing ashore along the Atlantic coast between Palm Beach and Broward Counties. STR and Y-STR testing confirmed the remains were human, and male. There were no bones to estimate age or ancestry. There was no missing persons report to check against. Two labs ran the DNA independently and got […]