title: Full STR profile of a 67-year-old bone found in a fresh water lake.
abstract: DNA extraction from and DNA typing of fresh water-exposed aged bone specimens poses a challenging task and is not very well examined. This study presents a new method to extract typable DNA from such problematic bone specimens. The procedure comprises low-heat drilling and cryogrinding, mild lysis conditions, and silica-column-based DNA cleaning. DNA quantity is assessed by quantitative PCR prior to short tandem repeat (STR) amplification. The procedure was employed with a 67-year-old tibia bone fragment recovered from a fresh water lake and succeeded to produce a full STR profile using the MPX-SP1 and MPX-SP2 mini-STR kits and a partial profile with 12 successfully amplified STRs using the Identifiler STR kit. The new method for the extraction of DNA from aged fresh water-exposed bone specimens presented herein was successfully applied to prepare DNA of sufficient quality and quantity to generate a full STR profile.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Forensic Medicine, University of Bonn, Germany. cornelius.courts@uni-bonn.de
authors.forename: Cornelius
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Courts
authors.forename: Burkhard
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Madea
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D016172:DNA Fingerprinting / Q000379:methods*; D005618:Fresh Water; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D016133:Polymerase Chain Reaction; D020080:Tandem Repeat Sequences; D013977:Tibia / Q000737:chemistry*