Parentage Testing and Kinship Analysis

Most publically funded forensic DNA laboratories in the United States do not apply their DNA typing skills to cases that involve questioned family relationships, choosing to contract the testing or perhaps the statistical calculations with private parentage testing laboratories. Although crime labs will acknowledge that occasionally parentage testing is needed (for rape cases leading to conception for example), these cases are historically infrequent and are better processed by an outside lab that specializes in parentage testing. This viewpoint is slowly changing, however, due to the recent interest in familial searching of CODIS databases as part of the investigative process and the efforts of some laboratories to identify human remains. These applications and others highlight the need for crime labs to understand the methodological and statistical approach to family relationship testing that is the focus of this article.