May 7, 2008

County buys 2 DNA machines

Purchases will ease number of forensic lab's backlogged cases

By Shaun Bishop / Daily News Staff Writer

Two new DNA processing machines will help San Mateo County's forensics lab process samples faster as the lab prepares for a bigger workload when a new law takes effect next year.

The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved the purchase of a Quiagen BioRobot EZ1, which automatically extracts and purifies DNA samples, and an Applied Biosystems Four-Capillary 3130 Genetic Analyzer and DNA sequencer, for analyzing the DNA.

Together, the two machines cost $102,534 and will be paid for with a federal grant intended to help relieve DNA processing backlogs.

"It's really a new investigative tool that we're using, and it has opened the doors in a number of areas for police departments to be able to follow up on cold cases that otherwise would have gone unsolved," said Jim Granucci, director of the county's forensics lab.

All of California's forensics labs will face increased pressure to churn out DNA analyses after a key provision of the 2004 voter initiative Proposition 69 takes effect in January 2009.

The initiative currently requires all convicted felons to submit DNA samples. Next year, anyone arrested for a felony will be required to fork over their DNA.

The county already has one of each of the machines that will be purchased, but having another set means lab workers will do less manual work, Granucci said.

Processing a sample currently takes an average of 100 days, and the new equipment is expected to cut that down to about 80 days, according to lab statistics. Samples can be churned out in two days or less when timeliness is important, such as for a homicide or a serial rapist, Granucci said.

In April, the county's lab processed 114 samples that produced 82 DNA profiles. Some samples do not have enough quality genetic material to produce a DNA profile, he said.

Granucci said he expects the lab's volume of DNA samples to increase up to 20 percent when the Proposition 69 rules go into effect. The county has a backlog of about 100 cases.

And as the DNA database grows, he said, "We'll start to get cold hits" on cases in which detectives exhausted leads.



E-mail Shaun Bishop at sbishop@dailynewsgroup.com.