Innovation in DNA Analysis

After years of research, the denaturing high-performance liquid chromatography (DHPLC) originally developed as a biomedical technology for medical applications was adapted to forensic application. DHPLC allows for the rapid and accurate separation of mixtures that contain the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of more than one person. The DHPLC method has the potential to benefit criminal and mass disaster investigations requiring timely analysis of mtDNA. This paper describes two major forensic applications for DHPLC in expediting mtDNA processing. The first application is comparative sequence analysis, and the second application of DHPLC application is the ability to separate mixtures that contain the mtDNA of more than one person.