The 22nd International Congress of the International Society for Forensic Genetics was held from 21 to 25 August 2007 in Copenhagen, Denmark. The president of the congress was Professor Niels Morling, Section of Forensic Genetics, Department of Forensic Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Before the congress, educational workshops were held 19 to 20 August 2008. A two day-educational workshop was organised by Peter Gill with the subject: Statistical interpretation of crime case DNA. Four half-day educational workshops were also organised. The subjects were: STR with CE and trouble shooting (John Butler), mtDNA typing – EMPOP (organiser: Walther Parson), Relationship testing statistics (Charles Brenner), and Validation and implementation of new technologies (John Butler). Each of the educational workshops was attended by 100 – 200 participants.

The scientific programme of the congress began on 21 August 2008 with the ISFG Scientific Prize 2005 Lecture given by Professor Walther Parsons, Innsbruck, Austria: The role of phylogenetics for forensic mtDNA analysis. Five invited speakers, 51 selected, oral presentations and 325 posters made the congress a success.

The board of the ISFG presented a prize for the best oral presentation to Florian Pitterl, Institute of Legal Medicine, Innsbruck Medical University, Austria for the work: Florian Pitterl, Herbert Oberacher, Gabriela Huber, Harald Niederstätter, Walther Parson: Simultaneous detection of length and nucleotide variability in STRs by High-Performance (Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry). The prize for the best poster was given to Myung Jin Park, Myung Jin Park, Hwan Young Lee, Na Young Kim, Soong Deok Lee, Woo Ick Yang, Sang-Ho Cho, Kyoung-Jin Shin: Genetic characteristics of 22 Y-STRs in Koreans: Atypical alleles, deletions in the DYS385 flanking region, and null alleles associated with AZFc microdeletions.

This volume of Progress in Forensic Genetics is the first completely electronic version of the proceedings of an ISFG Congress. The proceedings are published as a supplement to Forensic Science International: Genetics. This supplement with the proceedings of the ISFG congress will be freely available to all readers.

The proceedings mainly contain short manuscripts of the oral and poster presentations at the congress. The manuscripts have been through a reviewing and an editing procedure in order to maintain the high quality of the series and in order to keep the total volume of the publication at a level that can be afforded by the ISFG. However, priority was given to fast publication of the volume and, therefore, the manuscripts were not edited in detail if the message was clear to the reader. We hope that the readers will understand and agree with this decision.