Developers
M. Kayser, D. Zubakov, F. Liu, etc.
Description of the technology
Establishing the age of unknown person may provide important leads in police investigations, disaster victim identification, identity fraud cases, etc. Current methods mostly rely on odontological or skeleton analysis. The establishment of molecular methods for forensic age estimation using samples that possess no morphological information, such as bloodstains, would be extremely valuable as this type of samples is commonly found at crime scenes. Previously,
Recently, Dutch scientists led by prof. M. Kayser proposed a new
Practical application
Preliminary results indicate that the newly identified biomarkers have a potential to predict a person’s age from blood with a higher accuracy than any other method proposed so far.
Laboratories
- Department of Forensic Molecular Biology, Erasmus MC — University Medical Center Rotterdam, (Netherlands)
- Erasmus Center of Biomics, Erasmus MC — University Medical Center Rotterdam, (Netherlands)
- Department of Clinical Genetics, Erasmus MC — University Medical Center Rotterdam, (Netherlands)
- Department of Epidemiology, Erasmus MC — Universify Medical Center Rotterdam, (Netherlands)
- Epigenomics AG, Berlin, (Germany)
Links
http://www.isfg.org/files/ISFG2011_abstracts.pdfPublications
- Zubakov, Dmitry, et al. «Estimating human age from
T-cell DNA rearrangements." Current Biology 20.22 (2010):R970-R971 . - Ren, Fu, et al. «Estimation of human age according to telomere shortening in peripheral blood leukocytes of Tibetan." The American journal of forensic medicine and pathology 30.3 (2009): 252–255.
- Karlsson, Andreas O., et al. «Estimating human age in forensic samples by analysis of telomere repeats." Forensic Science International: Genetics Supplement Series 1.1 (2008): 569–571.
- Gršković, Branka, et al. «DNA methylation: the future of crime scene investigation?." Molecular biology reports 40.7 (2013): 4349–4360.