DNA typing strategy to overcome post-mortem bone maceration

Chemical maceration is a useful procedure to remove soft tissues and to bleach bones facilitating the forensic anthropologist examination. However, prolonged exposure to chemicals often compromises DNA recovery and its amplification via PCR. Our purpose was to test the new generation multiplexes to type nuclear DNA and contemporarily to verify the possibility of mt-DNA sequencing. Our work demonstrates the ability of NGM kit (Applied Biosystems, Foster City, CA) to give a result when applied after an extraction strategy that implies large amounts of bone powder, a high affinity column separation and a "small meshed molecular size" concentration. Finally, we suggest not to use chemicals to macerate human bones for the purpose of identity or at least to save a fragment of femur from the treatment but if this is not the case, we indicate an analytical strategy that consider as the best method to obtain a nuclear-DNA profile in highly degraded DNA condition