It’s not yet been verified, but an ABC News report claims that Osama bin Laden’s body was positively identified using not only facial recognition but on an analysis based on DNA from his dead sister’s brain, gathered by federal agents when she died of cancer in Boston last year.Positive DNA identification was necessary, and not just because bin Laden was reportedly shot in the eye: without conclusive evidence, U.S. officials would face speculation about his survival, given the symbolic importance of America’s most notorious enemy in history. Shortly after his death was announced, Twitter was trending pings for “osama long-form death certificate” at roughly 400 tweets per minute.Per Islamic custom, bin Laden was buried quickly after being photographed, and at sea, since a land burial would give his followers a pilgrimage destination.If the FBI did collect a DNA sample from bin Laden’s dead sister, it would have most likely been frozen and stored in the FBI’s CODIS database and compared to DNA collected from the dead body in Pakistan using a simple polymerase chain reaction test. Here’s a video illustrating how a “fingerprint” PCR test works: