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The old-fashioned police sketch is getting a makeover.

Researchers are identifying genes that give rise to a person's physical traits, such as facial structure, skin color or even whether they are right- or left-handed. That could allow police to build a picture of what a criminal looks like not just from sometimes-fuzzy eyewitness accounts, but by analyzing DNA found at a crime scene.

Forensic experts are increasingly relying on DNA as "a genetic eyewitness," says Jack Ballantyne, associate director for research at the National Center for Forensic Science at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, who is studying whether a DNA sample can reveal a person's age. "We'd like to say if the DNA found on a bomb fragment comes from the young man who carried the bomb or from the wizened old mastermind who built it."

The push to predict physical features from genetic material is known as DNA forensic phenotyping, and it's already helped crack some difficult investigations. In 2004, police caught a Louisiana serial killer who eyewitnesses had suggested was white, but whose crime-scene DNA suggested...