Evaluation of Methods to Process Bone Evidence for Forensic DNA Analysis

摘要

Purpose: Forensic analysis of DNA from bone can be important in investigating a variety of casesinvolving violent crimes and missing persons. To remove the potential presence of co-mingled remains and toeliminate contaminants that interfere with forensic DNA analysis, the outer surface of the bone fragment must becleaned. In this study, the application of the enzymatic trypsin method on bone cleaning for DNA isolation wasstudied in challenged bone samples that are more typically encountered in actual forensic cases. Methods:Mechanical sanding and enzymatic trypsin methods were compared. To evaluate the integrity of the mtDNAisolated, the amplified mitochondrial DNA at the hypervariable regions were quantified and compared. Results:Comparable levels of amplification success of mitochondrial DNA fragments were observed between the twomethods. A paired-sample t-test revealed no significant difference between the two methods, overall.Conclusions: Our data suggested that the enzymatic trypsin method can be used as an alternative to mechanicalmethods. This method can be used to process multiple samples simultaneously, which is useful for achievinghigh throughput DNA isolation through potential automation.