Identification of Human Remains for Forensic and Humanitarian Purposes: From Molecular to Physical Methods
A special issue of Genes (ISSN 2073-4425). This special issue belongs to the section "Molecular Genetics and Genomics".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (5 January 2024) | Viewed by 32532
Special Issue Editors
Interests: forensic molecular anthropology; human remains identification; DNA; STRs; SNPs; phenotyping; biogeographical ancestry; massively parallel sequencing
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: forensic anthropology; forensic pathology; clinical forensic medicine; identification; migration; unidentified decedents; ambiguous loss
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Human remains identification, that is, the ability to allocate a name to an unidentified person, is an important part of a wider and complex multidisciplinary process and a crucial step for contributing to the proper and healthy functioning of a civil society and of justice. The process of identifying a person in forensic and humanitarian contexts (for example, in disaster victim identification (DVI) and missing persons identification (MPI) scenarios) does not just represent a legal necessity/duty but also a fundamental right of all individuals and their families, for administrative, criminal, civil, ethical reasons and in order to avoid the flail of ambiguous loss for relatives seeking their loved ones. The identification process implicates the comparison of information of various kinds provided by someone (a family member, a colleague, a friend) who knows the person (antemortem data) with the scientific information obtained by a range of forensic experts during the examination and study of human remains (postmortem data). Over the past twenty years, we have seen the development of new technologies in diverse scientific fields as well as an improvement of existing ones that have allowed us to obtain results that until recently were not technically feasible and affordable.
This Special Issue is aimed at investigating recent advances in human remains identification. It focuses on collecting reviews and original contributions considering the importance of a multidisciplinary approach to support the identification phases of human remains as well as innovative methodological aspects, bioinformatics and statistical tools, and future prospects of forensic/humanitarian research.
Prof. Dr. Elena Pilli
Prof. Dr. Cristina Cattaneo
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- skeletal remains
- missing persons
- identification process
- DNA analysis
- forensic anthropology
- forensic odontology
- human rights
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