A full 23-locus STR profile from 30 mg of bone powder, taken from a femur with a degradation index between 5.17 and 8.26.

That is one of the results Dr Grant Broomfield is presenting at ISHI 2026 this week, from work with Victoria Dominguez at Lehman College, CUNY, Mia Ormsby at the University of Otago, and Sara Zapico at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. Four human femora, bone inputs from 50 mg down to 1 mg, and a single-tube forensicGEM extraction of around 15 minutes.

The finding that matters most for casework is not the yield. Every sample, at every input, gave enough DNA to amplify. What decided how complete the profile was turned out to be degradation, not quantity.