The contemporary media provides a plethora of images of science and scientific practice. These often revolve around forensic technologies and the potential they offer in the investigation of crime. Whereas there are numerous accounts of the perceptions of these technologies and their uses by specific interested parties, from police personnel through to juries, this book is the first of its kind...

Coupling dense genotype data with new computational methods offers unprecedented opportunities for individual-level ancestry estimation once geographically precisely defined reference data sets become available. We study such a reference data set for Finland containing 2376 such individuals from the FINRISK Study survey of 1997 both of whose parents were born close to each other. This sampling ...

This paper considers identification problems based on DNA marker data. The topics we discuss are general, but we will exemplify them in a simple context. There is DNA available from two persons. There is uncertainty about the relationship between the two individuals and a number of hypotheses describing the possible relationship is available. The task is to determine the most likely pedigree. T...

Insertion/deletion polymorphisms (InDels) are ubiquitous diallelic genetic markers that have drawn increasing attention from forensic researchers. Here, we investigated 30 InDel loci in Vietnamese and Nigerian populations and evaluated their usefulness in forensic genetics. The polymorphic information content of these populations ranged, respectively, from 0.164 to 0.375 and from 0.090 to 0.375...

Patterns of genetic variation in human populations across the African continent are still not well studied in comparison with Eurasia and America, despite the high genetic and cultural diversity among African populations. In population and forensic genetic studies a single sample is often used to represent a complete African region. In such a scenario, inappropriate sampling strategies and/or t...

When DNA profiling technique is being performed using any biological specimen from the individual, it promises the correct and unambiguous individualization, but in certain cases the forensic scientist may encounter the problem of mixed or completely mismatched DNA profile of a single individual [1,2]. STR’s (short tandem repeat) may lead to erroneous conclusion when the source of the biologica...