Nowadays DNA based Missing Person identification programs become more and more significant. These programs can differ greatly in what is being investigated; ranging from war victims or still unidentified victims of historic disasters (such as the 1953 North Sea Flood in the Netherlands) to contemporary (international) missing person cases. These investigations do not even always have to involve Unidentified Human Remains (UHR), missing person programs can also be applied for Family Reunifications in order to rectify historical wrong doing by certain regimes. The Desaparecidos from Argentina, or Desaparecidos del franquismo from Spain are examples of this.
What these programs have in common is that these are usually long running programs that involve voluntarily provided DNA profiles. Because of this, appropriate security measures must be in place to ensure that these profiles are only used for their intended purpose.
Bonaparte′s advanced algorithms are especially suited to deal with these complex cases. For historic investigations complexity might arise out of the fact that a lot of unknown data and/or degraded DNA is involved. The security features of Bonaparte provide protection against the misuse of the voluntarily provided DNA profiles, and ensure only authorized users can work with these.
In the case of a mass disaster many important issues have to be addressed. An airplane crash, a tsunami or terrorist attack puts public directors and law enforcement into the spotlight where they have to restore public order, trust and ensure public safety. The causes must be investigated and if applicable the perpetrators must be brought to justice.
In order to accomplish this it is important that victims are correctly and swiftly identified. Modern DNA technology provides superb tools for this. Nowadays DNA profiles can be generated quickly, and multiple profiles might even be taken from the same sample. This will cause a significant number of DNA profiles to be processed even for smaller incidents.
Bonaparte is the perfect system for processing these databases. We employ advanced statistical algorithms that can handle arbitrary large pedigree trees. These algorithms compute the so-called indirect matches between victim profiles and profiles from related individuals, such as for example the parents of a victim.
Bonaparte has a proven to be a useful system for DVI, it was used for the identification of the victims of Afriqiyah Airways Flight 8U771 (2010) and Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 (2014) at the Netherlands Forensic institute.
Bonaparte′s validated algorithms that were originally developed for DVI purposes can also be used for efficient searching in large criminal databases. For example a DNA profile obtained from a crime scene trace can be matched against DNA profiles stored in the criminal database. This can be done for relatively simple tests like Paternity (PI), Sibling (SI) or Half Sibling (HSI), for full arbitrary pedigree searches or for a comparison (e.g. a Direct match).
The complexity here usually lies in the size of the target database. In order to mitigate this, advanced storage containers have been developed that allows storing of millions of DNA profiles while still allowing for full rewind, logging and auditing capabilities. These containers offer the same security features as the containers for smaller scale projects.
Another type of investigation which broadly resembles the criminal investigation is the dragnet
search. Instead of using the criminal database with offender profiles, a DNA database with voluntary
provided DNA profiles is created. A suspect DNA profile obtained from a crime scene is then matched
against this database to reveil any potential familiar links.
This type of investigation has been deployed in the Netherlands a couple of times, the first one
was to resolve a 13 year old cold case.
In the Netherlands, French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte is responsible
for formally introducing first and last names (family name)
by introducing the Registry Office.
In that sense, he was responsible for giving people their name.
The Bonaparte system attempts to do the same; giving back the name to unidentified individuals through DNA identification.