Genetic analysis of modern and historical burned human remains.

Abstract

Burning of corpses is a well-known funeral procedure that has been performed for a long time in many cultures. Nowadays more and more corpses are burned in crematories and buried in urns, often for practical and financial reasons. In some scientific, criminal or civil cases even after cremation there is the need of genetic investigations for identification or paternity testing. Furthermore, burned remains are the only remains left in North Europe from 1200 BC to 500 AD. This makes genetic investigation of those materials interesting for anthropological reasons. We present on one hand a systematic investigation of 10 corpses before and after the cremation and on the other hand the analysis of seven historical remains representing the bronze age. We chose the ground bone powder and the less destroyed bone parts respectively and employed a slightly modified commercially available DNA extraction method. The presence of human nuclear and mitochondrial DNA was tested by a simple but highly sensitive Duplex-PCR. DNA quantification was done using real time PCR, and genetic typing was tried out using the AmpFISTR Identifiler Multiplex Kit, followed by an automatic analysis on an AbiPrism310.