Originally Posted by
Recc
Maybe not the place to have this discussion as it is completely irrelevant to the topic.
Genotyping (even 10s of thousands) of recovered tissue samples on a forensic STR kit is trivially easy. Genotyping 300 samples from relatives is trivially easy. Statistical matching of STR profiles for identification is trivially easy. Whether you have a pre-existing database would have next to no influence on the technical process. As someone else pointed out above, the difficult bit is finding and collecting the tissue samples.
There is perhaps a slight relevance - one way of reading the official Chinese government statement on the DNA identification is that none of the expected passengers and crew were (last minute?) missing; and that no DNA other than that expected was found. Somebody on the investigating teams will have been tasked with checking those two possibilities out.....