Family match

Brenda Maribel Corado was walking down a street in Guatamala when two women beat her and snatched away her three-week-old baby girl. Two months later, baby Angela turned up at a church. When Angela’s DNA was tested, Corado and her husband matched with 99.9% accuracy, and the baby girl was reunited with her parents.

Unfortunately, many stories of missing persons don’t end as well as Angela’s. Every year, hundreds of thousands of children are sold into modern-day slavery, often to be sexually exploited, at too young an age to know who they are or where they’re from, according to Jose Lorente of the University of Granada Genetic Identification Laboratory in Spain. Human trafficking—internationally defined as forcible coercion or selling of people—has become a $32 billion international industry.

Read more of my feature at BioTechniques.