paper on DNA purity and PCR efficiency - looking for articles (Jun/02/2010 )

Maddie on Jun 8 2010, 07:55 PM said:

Sounds as if you want to be 'better' or 'superior' to those people with lots of money and experience...what's wrong with working on mtDNA? I guess you can also find sequences that are polymorphic enough for fingerprints, though if I remember right microsats are missing..

oh I love mito. Problem is the control region, althought very polymorphic, isn't person specific. You and me may have the same sequence althought not related. For identification purposes, most labs do need to use STR since, in theory, it's as unique as a fingerprint. Anyway. No I don't want to do better, I am trying to find a way to help Forensic labs that work on old bones get better genomic DNA, especially labs (like mine) that don't have access to NGS.

Maddie on Jun 9 2010, 10:40 PM said:

And what about SNPs? I'm not familiar with human mtDNA, but in insects there are 2-3 polymorphic regions on mtDNA, this is control region, and noncoding intergenic regions. If more , I'm not sure...have to look it up

We sometimes use mt SNP when we get a very common profile. My problem here is not what target to chose, we have forensic kits already optimized for loci that are analyzed in all the labs around the world. It's important to make sure everyone works on the same markers in order to create databases (especially crime labs).
So, I'm not trying to get a new method of identification, my only business at the moment is to boost DNA yield without increasing other crap (pardon my French) that ends up inhibiting. Oui?

Maddie on Jun 9 2010, 11:21 PM said:

Have you tried magnetic beads then?

I did and I lose lots of DNA unfortunately.

Talking about beads, does someone know how beads select DNA according to size? This is a mystery to me. A colleague says the number of SPRI beads will dictate the size of the DNA fragments you recover. why?