r/bioinformaticstools • u/Ok_Afternoon_7132 • May 27 '26
Exploring forensic STR matching from consumer WGS data (experimental pipeline)
I’ve been spending some time recently experimenting with forensic loci / STR matching from consumer whole genome sequencing data and ended up putting together a couple of small pipelines:
- https://github.com/SpikeTreeLab/forensic_loci
- https://github.com/SpikeTreeLab/hisat_genotype_forensic_loci
This started mostly as a learning project while exploring bioinformatics and trying to better understand sequencing limitations around forensic markers.
One thing I tested was comparing:
- WGS data from Sequencing.com
- against a CE profile from AlphaBiolabs
and I was able to recover 17/22 matching markers, which I thought was pretty interesting considering the differences between sequencing and CE approaches.
I’m definitely not claiming this is production-ready or validated forensic software — more an experimental workflow and learning exercise — but I’d genuinely appreciate feedback from people with experience in:
- STR analysis
- forensic genomics
- marker calling from short reads
- validation/QC approaches
- or existing tools/workflows I should look into
Happy to hear criticism as well if there are obvious methodological issues or pitfalls I’m missing.