The U.S. and Global Security Review - Blog by Michael Novakhov

"Scientists expect many to be matches that confirm the guilt of people already caught, but others, they hope, will provide a jump-start to long-dormant unsolved cases...  The FBI’s DNA database is like a giant computerized collection of bar codes for human beings’ genetic information. It was launched in 1998 with nine participating states, and after three years it held 800,000 DNA profiles, including known offenders and unknown suspect samples. Now fed by DNA profiles from every state, and local as well as federal investigations, today there are more than 15 million profiles in the system, making it the largest collection of such data in the world...  The FBI’s longstanding practice was to identify “hits’’ by focusing on 13 specific locations in DNA to look for repeating genetic-code patterns. If there were matches on 10 of the 13 locations, the samples were judged as potential matches. But starting in May, the FBI began studying its samples by looking for pattern matches...