Cece Moore

They have three different databases.

How many in GEDmatch?

How many in GEDmatch?

GEDmatch has about 1.5 million, but that's only about a third of those are opted into law enforcement matching.

So we can only use about 500,000 to identify violent criminals.

Yes.

It's like stepping back into 2014 when I was first trying to solve family mysteries, adoptions, and things like that.

It is very difficult.

It's very challenging.

So we get the unknown individual's DNA from the crime scene.

It might be semen, blood, saliva, even touch DNA.

And we have to send that to a private lab.

So none of the crime labs have the capability to create the type of DNA profile that we need.

The law enforcement databases, as I mentioned, are based on a type of genetic marker called an STR, single nucleotide, I'm sorry, single tandem repeat.

And we use SNPs, which is a totally different type of genetic marker, a single nucleotide polymorphism.

And so we have to start from scratch.

And that means there has to be DNA left from that crime scene.

If they've used it all up, then we cannot do genetic genealogy.

So it goes to a private lab where it is analyzed.

And just like they would analyze it at, say, AncestryDNA or 23andMe, we need it to be compatible with those profiles because that's the type of profiles we're going to compare against.