SINGAPORE - When a human skeleton was found under a bridge in Kallang Bahru in November 2020, the autopsy report could only conclude that it had been that of a man between the age of 30 and 60 who had died six months to a year before.

But thanks to the adoption that year of a different extraction method by the Health Sciences Authority's (HSA) DNA Profiling Laboratory (DNAPL), forensic scientists were able to extract enough DNA from the bones to build a genetic profile of the dead man.