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Mother
Human
remains
Father
Figure 11.3 The identification of human remains recovered from an air crash [40]. Blood samples
were provided by the mother and father who were missing a son. In alleles in the profile of human
remains could have come from the mother and father (indicated by the arrows). The profiles were
generated using the AmpF STR Profiler Plus STR kit (Applied Biosystems)
the DQ
locus [35, 36]. Unfortunately, this system did not have high powers of dis-
crimination and it was not until the early 1990s that DNA profiling was successfully
applied to the identification of human remains [37, 38]. As DNA profiling technology
and methodology have evolved to be more robust and powerful, it has been applied
to increasingly complex situations including the identification of people killed in air
crashes [28, 39 - 42]; fire [43 - 46]; terrorist attacks [47 - 50]; natural disasters [51];
and war [52 - 55]. STRs are the most commonly used tool but mitochondrial DNA
(see Chapter 13) and SNPs (see Chapter 12) have also been employed on occasion.
The matching of human remains can be through comparison of DNA recovered
from personal objects that belonged to the missing person, such as combs and tooth-
brushes [56], or by comparison to close family members (Figure 11.3).
In cases that involve hundreds of victims, the statistical analysis becomes very
complex. Because of the high number of pair-wise comparisons that are made
between the victims and relatives, the potential for coincidental matches that result
in false positives and ultimately misidentifications is significant [51, 56, 57]. The
existence of relatives within the population of victims also complicates the analysis
[28, 51] and there are limitations as to what can be achieved.
α
Further reading
Balding, D.J. (2005) Weight-of-evidence for Forensic DNA Profiles , John Wiley & Sons, Ltd,
Chichester, pp. 82 - 134.
Buckleton, J., Triggs, C.M. and Walsh, S.J. (2005) Forensic DNA Evidence Interpretation , CRC
Press, pp. 341 - 347.
References
1. American Association of Blood Banks (2004) Annual Report Summary for Testing in 2004.
2. Jeffreys, A.J., Brookfield, J.F.Y. and Semenoff, R. (1985) Positive identification of an immi-
gration test-case using human DNA fingerprints. Nature , 317 , 818 - 819.
 
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