Jaehee Kim

The talk will demonstrate a surprising result in population genetics, forensic genetics, and genomic privacy: profiles of the 13 CODIS markers used in forensic genetics in the United States can be connected to standard genome-wide biomedical marker profiles of related individuals, even when such profiles do not include any of the forensic markers themselves. The work addresses scientific questions raised by the widely reported announcement of new forensic methods in the recent “Golden State Killer” case. In that case, investigators identified a suspect by querying genome-wide SNPs in the crime-scene DNA against public SNP databases for matches indicating relatedness between the crime-scene DNA and database entrants. Our work extends in a related direction to ask the question: “To what extent can a person’s CODIS STR genetic markers—the markers routinely used by law enforcement—be statistically connected to the genome-wide SNP markers of his or her close relatives?”