NCJ Number
207175
Journal
Journal of Forensic Sciences Volume: 49 Issue: 5 Dated: September 2004 Pages: 939-953
Date Published
September 2004
Length
15 pages
Annotation
This article describes the software developed to automate kinship analysis from STR-based DNA typing in the identification of victims from the Swissair Flight 111 disaster (September 2, 1998), which involved the massive destruction of a widebody jetliner and severe fragmentation of all 229 passengers and crew members on board.
Abstract
Personal effects of the victims were retrieved from their residences and reference blood or bucal samples were obtained from family relatives purported to be direct biological relations of the victims. The Kinship Analysis software package was written in Visual Basic and performed the following main functions: searches for perfect matches between victim genotypes and those of personal effects; calculation of genetic relatedness index between query and each genotype in the interrogated database; identification of matching rare alleles and potential plus-or-minus core repeat slip mutations; and the production of software-annotated score reports to display the best score for each queried genotype. Exclusion of fortuitous kinship association (FKA) was possible through the recovery of at least one sample of remains for every victim. Using short tandem repeat (STR) DNA typing data produced with AmpF/STR Profiler Plus and AmpF/STR COfiler kits, the software systematically compared each STR genotype with every other genotype. This was the first mass fatality incident to use commercialized STR-based megaplexes. The identification of all victims in just 104 days demonstrated the usefulness of such systems in the processing of large numbers of compromised samples. It was also the first time a bioinformatic tool was created to assist with genotype matching and kinship analysis by using systematic comparative genotyping. 4 tables, 11 figures, and 15 references