Abstract
Mexico is currently facing a forensic crisis. Since 2006, the “war on drugs” has resulted in countless unidentified bodies and body parts linked to organized crime and its enforcement. Many of these remains show advanced decomposition, complicating identification. With over 52,000 deceased persons, the National Human Rights Commission has recognized the situation as a humanitarian crisis. This talk addresses the challenges of identifying severely degraded human remains using DNA, focusing on how commercially available table salt and tendons can enhance DNA recovery. In addition, various techniques for DNA extraction from bones will be compared and it will be shown how small changes in extraction protocols can significantly improve the success rate of identification and support humanitarian forensic efforts.

Biosketch
Valentina Leonie Birne is a doctoral candidate in forensic biology at the Institute of Legal Medicine in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Her research focuses on the genetic identification of human remains, with a particular interest in the application of molecular methods to the preservation of human tissue samples and the prediction of eye, hair and skin colour, especially in difficult bone samples. She has gained international research experience while working as a research assistant in the German-Mexican cooperation project “CoCiMex”, supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and in the UNFPA-funded project “Identificación Humana en México”, which aims to identify unknown deceased persons in Mexico.