期刊名称：Brazilian Journal of Forensic Sciences, Medical Law and Bioethics
电子版ISSN：2237-261X
出版年度：2016
卷号：6
期号：1
页码：84-107
DOI：10.17063/bjfs6(1)y201684
出版社：Instituto Paulista de Estudos Bioéticos e Jurídicos
摘要：The DNA can be used as a tool in any criminal investigation, it is a vestige capable to connect people and objects to the crime scene with a high degree of reliability, as well as being extremely important for human identification and identification of human remains.Although the discovery of DNA was not recent, and its use even in the forensic area is already happening a few years, we can see that research in this field have not ceased, and there are endless possibilities for improving techniques and methods used today.Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) can be a good alternative for DNA typing when the nuclear DNA is available in small amounts, degraded or contaminated and the possibility of conducting tests with this DNA is smaller.Due to the higher number of copies of mtDNA per cell, and the fact that this DNA is circular, and this within an organelle with double cell membrane, mtDNA has some protection on the degree of degradation.In addition, mtDNA is able to connect people to their maternal lineage, since it has only maternal inheritance.With the review we could see that there is a great tendency to analyze and sequence the entire mitochondrial genome, and not only the non-coding regions as before, thus it has arisen several methodologies able to perform this analysis, but has not been established a gold methodology for the analysis in question.We can also notice that has been expended efforts to find and analyze the heteroplasmias present in the mtDNA due to its ability to help in identification.Although mtDNA analysis is not yet used on a large scale in forensic routine laboratories, this is a subject that has been widely studied by the scientific community and this endorsement on the subject of knowledge is always beneficial and can help implement new methods, the cheapening of the use of these tests and the creation of kits that can be widely used.
关键词：mtDNA; Human identification; Forensic sciences; Criminal investigation; Forensic Genetics
