28-Sep-2023

TrueAllele identifies South African bus crash victims using kinship

A fiery 2008 South African bus crash in Komatipoort le 15 unidentified victims. There were no reference profiles. The police collected DNA from 15 possible relatives. But DNA analysis failed to identify the victims.

The police sent Cybergenetics DNA data from the unidentified victims and possible relatives. There was one relative for each victim. Within minutes, the TrueAllele® computer had derived “probabilistic” kinship genotypes from the relatives. Automatically comparing the genotypes of victims and relatives, TrueAllele identified 9 of the victims.

Cybergenetics spoke about this mass disaster solution at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences meeting this year, in a talk on “Identifying victim remains using kinship genotype inference”. You can watch the 15-minute YouTube presentation online.

TrueAllele is a proven mass disaster victim identification solution. The technology uses kinship to find missing person genotypes, even with sparse or unknown biological relationships.