VT FY07 NIJ Forensic DNA R&D

With the advent of innovative molecular biological techniques becoming the norm in the forensic laboratory, it is plausible to imagine the eventual replacement of traditional serological testing methods used to identify questioned stains with molecular biological techniques. Such testing could employ messenger RNA as the tissue specific determinant. The nature of this research is to identify messenger RNA transcripts that will identify the tissue of origin, determine if such transcripts survive the typical environmental insults that forensic samples may encounter, and to develop rapid multiplex assays to assess these molecules using small amounts of sample.

ca/ncf