Getting Started

There is a wealth of material available on the Cybergenetics website for learning about the objective computer interpretation of quantitative DNA evidence. Here is a guide to getting started.

The best place to begin is with Cybergenetics DNA Investigator™ newsletters. These short articles are written for the nonscientist. They introduce TrueAllele^® Casework, and show its use in court, validation studies and make comparisons with human review.

Cybergenetics researchers have written many scientific publications about TrueAllele evidence interpretation and how it fully preserves DNA identification information.

• We suggest first learning about DNA match in this short expository article.


• The operation and significance of the TrueAllele system are described in this peer-reviewed scientific validation paper. We recommend reading this long article over three separate sessions:


1. Introduction, Materials and Methods. These sections teach the underlying principles of probabilistic genotyping and DNA identification information. They also explain how to rigorously assess the reliability of any DNA interpretation method.


2. Case Example. A DNA mixture from a real case was analyzed both by man and machine. The computer's match score was a billion times greater. We examine ten different reasons, explored at ten different genetic loci, explaining how computers can preserve the match information that humans discard.


3. Results and Discussion. We compare computer and human review conducted on the same sixteen DNA mixture casework items. The results show that the TrueAllele computer is typically a million times more informative than human review, and establish the computer's reliability. The computer simply makes better use of the DNA data.

We provide free on-line course material (videos, slides, transcripts, etc.) about quantitative DNA mixture interpretation. The six 20 minute lectures on "DNA Identification for Scientists: Basics & Methods" are the starting point for students desiring a real understanding of scientific DNA interpretation.

After this basic introduction, you may want to view some of our scientific presentations about TrueAllele's methods and results. These short narrated PowerPoint movies provide a living history of the TrueAllele technology and its applications, as presented at scientific meetings.