The Behavior of Contamination and Methods for Extraction and Capture of Low Copy Number and Degraded DNA.

This purpose of this research is to test and evaluate three different 'DNA capture' methods for enriching CODIS marker DNA in LCN and degraded samples. Using a novel synthesized standard methodology the researchers will directly evaluate the efficiency of each method by determining the copy number originally entering the process and the number of copies retained at the end of the protocol. In this way, the performance of the methods will be determined relative to complete recovery of DNA. In addition, evaluation of the three capture methods will assess their respective abilities in removing PCR inhibitors from DNA extractions. Lastly, each method will be applied to capturing CODIS markers from approximately 500 year old human remains. The goal of this project is to identify methods that hold promise for more reliably recovering and typing CODIS profiles from LCN and degraded samples. ca/ncf