Criminals beware! Teeth too leave a trail

Criminals beware! Teeth too leave a trail
PRESS TRUST OF INDIA

New Delhi, Jan 4: Beware criminals, now erasing your fingerprints alone will not help, you will have to fix up your teeth and bite marks too as identification of individuals from teeth makes promising advances in the field of forensic science.

"Police, all over the world, has to deal with a large number of rape cases, and a systematic examination of teeth and bite marks found in several such cases is of great help," P K Chattopadhyay, Department of Forensic Science, Punjab University, Patiala told PTI.

The examination not only helps in determining the age and sex but also the specific individual from whom the teeth may have originated, he said.

"Racemization", a very important and recent development, has proved to be a landmark in this field, Chattopadhyay said adding that age of the culprit could be determined very accurately by this method with a negligible error margin.

The technique currently in use only in Japan and Germany has the potential to replace the traditional method which took into account the eruption and falling sequence of the teeth.

Teeth are characterised by the presence of enamel, dentine and the pulp cavity. Scrapings from the pulp cavity can be used for determining the species origin by specialised techniques like Gel-diffussion and Cross-over electrophoresis, he said.

Pulp cavity scrapings can also be used for determining the sex and a number of genetically determined polymorphic characters such as blood groups, enzyme types and DNA profiles which are not only useful in elimination purposes but also in actual identification of a specific individual conclusively, Chattopadhyay added.

The technique used fairly extensively in Western countries had failed to pick up in India due to the huge investment associated with it, he said.