Fingernail evidence is often collected in criminal cases of violent and/or sexual assault. In acts of aggression and self-defense, foreign deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) can be transferred from the perpetrator to beneath the surface of the fingernail of the victim. It is possible to recover this foreign, exogenous DNA from the victim’s fingernails and potentially identify the perpetrator via DNA analysis. When attempting to recover this DNA from fingernail clippings, a couple of problems can occur. Often times, not enough exogenous DNA gets trapped underneath fingernails, so there is not usually much DNA to work with for recovery. The other major problem is the presence of endogenous DNA from the fingernail donor. Not only is there donor DNA in the fingernail itself, but the donor’s own DNA can build up underneath their nails simply by rubbing their face or combing their fingers through their hair. This means that there can be more donor DNA present that can mask the presence of the foreign DNA and cloud the results.
In an attempt to improve the recovery of foreign DNA and produce a reportable, informative profile, a time course study was developed. Typically, when using forensicGEM as an extraction method, the samples would incubate for 15 minutes before going through protease inactivation. For this study, the extraction period was broken up into four 5-minute periods of incubating, for a total of 20 minutes, before inactivating the protease. This was done to pinpoint the time period at which more foreign DNA is being extracted from the surface of the nail before endogenous DNA is extracted in excess and clouds or even hides the presence of foreign DNA altogether. Female fingernail clippings were spiked with neat male saliva to observe the ratio of male to female DNA during quantitation and on the electropherograms.
The quantitation results depicted a strong presence of male DNA through the entirety of the time course, and female DNA did not appear to be extracted in greater levels until the 15 minutes of incubation. The resulting profiles exhibited the male saliva profile as the major contributor for most of the samples, especially at the 5- and 10-minute markers. In 50% of the profiles, a minor female contributor could be identified as the nail donor. One sample produced a single, male profile for each time point with no indication of a female donor present in the extract; another sample produced a profile with a male major contributor with only 3 to 6 loci having additional detectable alleles of a minor contributor at each time point. These alleles could not be conclusively attributed to the female nail donor, but she could not be excluded.
These preliminary results indicate that a shortening of the forensicGEM extraction period could be beneficial for improving the recovery ratio of exogenous to endogenous DNA from fingernail evidence.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/42176 |
| Date | 25 February 2021 |
| Creators | Nagle, Mary Corrine |
| Contributors | Cotton, Robin W. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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