1. Introduction
Airports are important hubs for bushmeat trade, that is, the illegal commercialization of wildlife meat, often from endangered species. While the identification of bushmeat species is sometimes possible morphologically, in most cases genetic characterization would be necessary for precise taxonomic identification. We validated a mtDNA-based species identification method for its application to bushmeat species imported into Switzerland. We then applied this method to identify the taxonomic origin of 250 samples of putative bushmeat confiscated at two Swiss airports. Our results show that this method is suitable to identify a broad spectrum of
Human identification is a need and a right of societies and is a part of a process that may involve social, criminal, legal, jurisdictional, political and humanitarian issues. In some situations such as mass fatality incidents, homicides, armed conflicts, war crimes, genocides, crimes against humanity and terrorism, DNA typing from bones may be the only method of human identification able to identify missing persons. Therefore, depending on the case, the kind and quality of the bone samples may vary widely, from recent samples to ancient and highly degraded skeletal human remains. The choice of the protocol for DNA extraction may be crucial for the results of DNA typing from bone samples and, thus, for the identification.
There are extracting protocols that require large amounts of bone material and protocols that use less starting material. Studies have shown that the best protocols should require less starting bone material, a smaller volume of reagents while having fewer inhibition problems and resulting in higher quality of the profiles recovered [1–3]. In this study, we compared the modified organic