Within You Without You: The World of Microbial Forensics
What’s in you and on you says a lot about you … and a lot about where you’ve been. Silvana Gaudieri, University of Western Australia FORENSICS AUSTRALIA – Thanks to television crime shows and crime novels many people are now familiar with the use of DNA as forensic evidence in criminal cases. In […]
Advancements in Technology Are Warming Up Cold Cases
The National Institute of Justice (NIJ), in its guidelines National Best Practices for Implementing and Sustaining a Cold Case Investigation Unit, defines a cold case as a case, “…such as a violent crime, missing person, or unidentified person, that has remained unsolved for at least three years and has the potential to be solved through […]
Long-Read Sequencing Technique As A Powerful Tool In Forensic Investigations
In the past twenty years, the statistical data on murders in USA stated that males account for most of the violent crimes. The work of the forensic analyst is very hard when dealing with evidence coming from a vaginal swab in a rape case, as the samples present mixtures. Because of this, the interpretation of […]
Telling the Stories of the Unidentified
According to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), 600,000 individuals go missing in the United States each year. While many are quickly found, it is estimated that 4,400 unidentified bodies are recovered each year, with 1,000 of them remaining unidentified after one year. All told, there are currently more than 40,000 sets of […]
A Passion to Succeed: Women in Forensic Science
From the days when Watson and Crick leveraged Rosalind Franklin’s x-ray diffraction images of DNA to identify DNA’s double helix structure, the contributions of women in the life sciences have often been overlooked or minimized. Written by: Ann MacPhetridge, PRomega UNESCO points out that women in STEM fields publish less, are paid […]
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! Why are You Publicly Sharing Your Child’s DNA Information? (The New […]
The Future of Forensic Science: An Interview with Athina Vidaki
Athina Vidaki, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands discusses the newest technologies and techniques in forensic science. From sequencing an entire genome from just a few cells, to predicting age and appearance from blood or saliva samples, the future of forensic casework is developing rapidly. […]
Demonstration of a Mitochondrial DNA-Compatible Workflow for Genetically Variant Peptide Identification from Human Hair Samples
Hair is an evidentiary sample that typically does not provide sufficient nuclear DNA for forensic analysis. Therefore, state-of-the-art forensic examination for hair samples include subjective microscopic evaluation, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analysis, and more recently, proteomic genotyping (hair is composed of up to 95% protein by mass) that uses protein variation in the form of genetically […]
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! Etched in DNA: Decoding the Secrets of the Past (The Christian […]
