No abstract

Forensic DNA databases that operate in the zone forming an interface between science and law have the purpose of gathering and processing DNA profiles for the needs of law enforcement and judicial authorities responsible for preventing and combating crime. Therefore, their appropriate functioning is important. On one hand, it improves efficiency of police work and, on the other hand, it has to play a required role in protecting citizen rights and personal data. The National DNA Database has functioned in Poland since 2007. Its effectiveness is correlated with the number of stored profiles. Despite small collection the Database has on numerous occasions proven its high usefulness in solving criminal cases. The possibility of carrying out searches in other countries databases, as well as legislative and organisational undertakings aiming at improvement of the Database operation are gradually bringing effects and result in an increased detective potential of this tool.

Information is an extremely important element of a successful fight with and prevention of crime. Comprehensive use of the information collected by the Police on crimes, their perpetrators and traces left at incident scenes is a guarantee of crime detection and, as a result, an improvement in the level of safety and public order. The originators of the HIT-NET system appreciate the great potential in the databases operating in the Police, in particular forensic databases. The basis of the concept of the designed IT system was to provide an effective IT tool allowing to indicate the relationship between hits found in DNA and fingerprint databases, and then link them with criminal data. The system being under creation makes it possible to find relationships as well as analyse and graphically visualise the identified networks of connections between people, traces and crimes, together with their presentation on a map.

RapidHITTM 200 by IntegenX® (Thermo Fisher Scientific) is an integrated system for fast human identification based on STR analysis, providing a number of advantages over traditional DNA profiling methods in terms of automation, speed of analysis and mobility. However, before rapid DNA technology could be implemented into routine forensic applications, both workflow and its results would have to be rigorously validated for reliability, performance and compatibility with data obtained from capillary electrophoresis, through an internal validation. As we were primarily interested in the RapidHITTM 200’s ability to efficiently generate DNA profiles from samples collected at crime scenes and to upload this data to the CODIS database (Combined DNA Index System), the evaluation study focused mainly on such samples. The results show that RapidHITTM 200 can be a useful tool to complement conventional identification methods used in forensic genetics.