Missing Persons Identification

Bode utilizes advanced proprietary extraction techniques along with cutting edge technology to provide DNA analysis on unidentified and challenging remains.

In efforts worldwide, Bode has processed more than 30,000 unidentified remains to using a variety of technologies including STRs, Y-STRs, mini-STRs, and mitochondrial DNA profiling.

Unidentified Remains

Bode Analyst Drilling a Human Femur

Bode has worked with medical examiners, coroners, law enforcement agencies, crime labs, and government organizations to support the identification of unidentified human remains through DNA analysis.  Support efforts include:

  • Unidentified victims of crimes
  • Victims of mass disasters
  • Mass casualty situations including the World Trade Center bombings and airplane crashes
  • Victims of conflict

Proprietary sampling techniques and proprietary extraction procedures have been developed to support generation STR profiles from bones, including those that are highly degraded and environmentally challenged samples.

CODIS Missing Persons Database

Bode has developed strategic partnerships with CODIS labs to allow for DNA results to be upload into the CODIS missing persons database.

Mass Disaster Support Success Stories

Bode has performed work on compromised samples to assist in the identification of victims of mass disasters. Some examples of processing skeletal remains include the following:

  • More than 20,000 skeletal remains have been processed from World Trade Center victims and over 9,800 reportable profiles were obtained from these highly compromised bone fragments
  • Successfully profiled over 200 skeletal samples, several hundred buccal samples, and many personal effects to help identify the victims of Hurricane Katrina
  • Analysis of victim and reference samples from the Alaska Airlines Flight 261 and American Airlines Flight 587 aircraft disasters
    • Bode was able to obtain DNA profiles from 93% of the 442 samples tested from AA587
  • Successfully identification of numerous individuals who went missing in Mexico
  • Identification of severely degraded remains from a WWII victim