Bringing MPS into Court Successfully – ISHI News

Session

Bringing MPS into Court Successfully

Tuesday September 15th, 2020 // 9:00 am - 9:35 am

We all know that it is very difficult to, not only develop a new forensic genetic method, but also apply it successfully to casework and get it accepted in court. With my laboratory I have worked since 2008 on the development of an massively parallel sequencing (MPS) based method to genotype short tandem repeat (STR) loci. After a lot of failures, we could finally receive ISO-17025 in 2015, for a complete pipeline that combines wet-work and bioinformatics and enables the reliable and reproducible sequencing of a set of autosomal STR loci and Y-STR loci. All this work culminated in January 2019 in, the conviction of a suspect of rape by the appeal court in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. As far as I am aware of, this was the first MPS-based conviction worldwide. This case, and a number of other case examples, will be discussed in my presentation.

Speakers

Private: Peter de Knijff

Professor in Population Genetics and Evolution Genetics, Leiden University Medical Center

Peter de Knijff is full professor in population genetics and evolutionary genetics at the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC). Since 1994 he has led the Forensic Laboratory for DNA Research at the LUMC. Together with Prof. Lutz Roewer of the Humbolt University in Berlin and Prof. Manfred Kayser of the Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, he was responsible for the worldwide introduction of Y-chromosomal microsatellites for forensic genetic and population genetic applications.

Submit Questions