Fire devastates communities and families, and it makes identification of victims challenging. In the aftermath of the wildfire that swept through Lahaina, Hawaii, officials are collecting DNA samples from relatives of missing persons in the hope that this can aid in identifying those who died in the fire.
will likely be analyzed for short tandem repeat markers and their allele profiles uploaded to the Relatives of Missing Persons index within the database. The expectation is that victims and their biological relatives share a percentage of alleles for these markers. For example, parents and children share 50% of their alleles, since a child inherits half of their DNA from each parent.
In addition, DNA preservation may vary considerably among the tissues, bones and teeth recovered. For example, researchers found that DNA identification of victims of the in 2001 was most successful when using bones of the feet and legs, compared with bones from the head and torso.DNA damage can take different forms. Nicks and breaks in the DNA make it difficult to analyze. Chemical modification of the DNA can result in changes to the original sequence or make it unreadable. This includes changes to the building blocks of DNA
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