Integrity of the DNA Extracted from Human Teeth Exposed to High Grades of Temperature as a Tool for Forensic Identification

Abstract

dentification of severely burnt bodies is a forensic challenge. A variety of events can lead to burned skeletal remains such as aircraft accidents, bombing, explosions and earthquakes. Homicidal, suicidal and accidental deaths all can involve the use of fire with variable results on human remains. Fire can be employed in an attempt to destroy forensic evidence in criminal cases, often to attempt to prevent identification and recovery. The degree of destruction in burned bodies depend on many factors such as the temperature to which the body was exposed, the time for which it is applied, the kind of transmission of heat to the body and other prevailing conditions. In burnt bodies, burning of the face and skull makes the visual identification of victims impossible and burning of hands and feet makes the conventional fingerprinting a hard task. DNA profiling is recognized as one of the possible key modes of identification in such cases. There are two main cellular locations for DNA, and both can be analyzed for profiling purposes, nuclear DNA which is found in the nucleus of each nucleated cell in the human body and represents a DNA source for most forensic applications, and mitochondrial DNA which resides within mitochondria in the cytosol of the cell.