Isolation, molecular characterization and forensic relevance of bacteria from undergarments of rape victims

Forensic science is a multidisciplinary endeavor involving various branches of science which focuses on the person or persons who perpetrated the crime, and also to the victims with the aim to conclusively detect the crime and to prove the link between crime scene, the victim and the suspect in the court of law beyond any doubt. In forensics, testing and characterization of blood group and/ or human DNA from crime scene samples is important for the identification purpose. There are instances where from many forensic samples despite of the presence of good amount of body fluids, blood group or DNA profile is not detectable, which makes the finding in the case as inconclusive. The bacteria are known degraders of organic molecules, but the bacterial flora of forensic samples and their possible role in degradation of body fluid has not yet worked out. This paper is an attempt towards isolation, biochemical and molecular characterization of bacteria from forensic case exhibits pertaining to rape cases and to initiate the work in this direction. To our knowledge this is the first report on isolation and molecular characterization of bacteria from forensic samples. Key words: Forensic, Microbiology, Body fluid, DNA, Degradation, 16S rRNA, Bacteria