The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) awarded patent US8898021 last week for a "Method and system for DNA mixture analysis" to Cybergenetics Chief Scientist Dr. Mark Perlin. Earlier this year, the European Patent Office granted DNA mixture analysis patent EP1229135 to Dr. Perlin. These seminal inventions have a 2001 priority date. Cybergenetics is an American bioinformation company specializing in the analysis of complex DNA evidence.
Most DNA evidence is a mixture of two or more people. Conventional forensic analysis over-simplifies mixture data, and may understate a DNA match statistic or reach no conclusion. Tens of thousands of crimes have informative DNA evidence that is never used for criminal justice. Many rapes and homicides with excellent DNA are not solved because of inadequate data analysis.
Cybergenetics TrueAllele® Casework technology solves the mixture problem through sophisticated computing that uses all the DNA data. Developed and refined over ten years, and extensively validated for another five years, TrueAllele has been used in over two hundred criminal cases across twenty three states. TrueAllele's reliability has been established in many scientific studies and in court.
"We are pleased that the USPTO has once again recognized our pioneering forensic science innovations in DNA mixture analysis," said Cybergenetics President Dr. Ria David. "The patented and proven TrueAllele technology provides fast and accurate DNA reporting that other methods cannot match, helping to secure justice for victims and protect society from crime."
TrueAlleles separates a mixture into genotypes, unmixing the contributors. Uncertainty is represented with probability. Sometimes called "probabilistic genotyping" or a "continuous method," TrueAllele compares genotypes to calculate accurate DNA match statistics.
A basic TrueAllele computer system enables a crime laboratory to reliably analyze a hundred mixtures a day. Parallel computing can expand that capacity ten-fold. TrueAllele's speed, accuracy, consistency, automation, objectivity, productivity and ease-of-use eliminate DNA bottlenecks and rapekit backlogs.