Possibility of Gender Misclassifications Due to Animal Crossamplifications in the Human Amelogenin Test

Amelogenin test is widely used in sex determination, mainly for forensic purposes. However, forensic samples obtained from the crime scene may be contaminated with nonhuman DNA. This source of error may have serious consequences in judicial procedures. Thus, our aim is to evaluate the possibility of cross-amplifications when a common human amelogenin test is undertaken on mixed human-animal DNA samples. Amelogenin test was firstly undertaken on non-mixed animal DNAs from cats, dogs, mice, pigs, rabbits, and rats. Each animal band pattern was analyzed and compared with human. After that, we carried out this test on human-animal mixed samples in different ratios of each DNA. Amelogenin test gave positive and potentially confounding amplifications in samples from cats, rats and pigs, but these animal amplifications were absent in mixed samples where the presence of human DNA inhibited the amplification of animal DNA. In conclusion, the possibility of errors in the amelogenin test due to non-human DNA contaminations seems to be low.