From Dust To Dust: Forensic Dna Analysis
The primary value of DNA profiling significantly increased over the last fifteen years due to introduction of short tandem repeat (STR) loci in routine paternity testing, forensic work and identification of victims of mass disaster. Different methods of forensic DNA testing (known as DNA fingerprinting) have been widely established and accepted as standard procedures of investigation. This lecture presents the experience of the last eighteen years of identification of missing persons in Bosnia and Croatia. The data show that current protocols and procedures optimized for relatively fresh bones and teeth can be used in analysis of much older samples without significant modification. Also, introduction of new technologies (e.g., miniSTR assay) can help recover information from degraded DNA samples that typically result in partial profiles and total loss of information from regular STR amplicons. This approach has already been used in the analysis of highly degraded samples like those from the victims of World Trade Center terrorist attacks and WWII. Now the use of this scientific approach has been proven even for the two millenia old bone samples. In collaboration with Roche Molecular Systems recently we used a new generation of mtDNA strips and were able to get full profiles from several century old bones even in a cases where STR amplification completely failed.