Forensic genomics

Transitioning from Forensic Genetics to Forensic Genomics

Due to its support of law enforcement, forensics is a conservative field; nevertheless, driven by scientific and technological progress, forensic genetics is slowly transitioning into forensic genomics. With this Special Issue of Genes we acknowledge and appreciate this rather recent development by not only introducing the field of forensics to the wider community of geneticists, but we do so b...

Mobile element-based forensic genomics.

Mobile elements are commonly referred to as selfish repetitive DNA sequences. However, mobile elements represent a unique and underutilized group of molecular markers. Several of their characteristics make them ideally suited for use as tools in forensic genomic applications. These include their nature as essentially homoplasy-free characters, they are identical by descent, the ancestral state ...

Targeted Next-Generation Sequencing for Forensic Genomics

Fungal Genomics: Forensic Evidence of Sexual Activity

The genome sequence of the 'asexual' human pathogenic fungus Aspergillus fumigatus suggests it has the capability to undergo mating and meiosis. That this organism engages in clandestine sexual activity is also suggested by observations of two equally distributed complementary mating types in nature, the expression of mating type genes and evidence of recent genome recombination events.

Forensic Genomics: kin privacy, driftnets and other open questionspdfauthor

DNA analysis is increasingly used in forensics, where it is being pushed as the holy grail of identification. But we are approaching a dramatic “phase change” as we move from genetics to genomics: when sequencing the entire genome of a person becomes sufficiently cheap as to become a routine operation, as is likely to happen in the coming decades, then each DNA examination will expose a wealth ...