Abstract
Mummified human tissues are of great interest in forensics and biomolecular archaeology. The aim of this study was to analyse post mortem DNA alterations in soft tissues in order to improve our knowledge of the patterns of DNA degradation that occur during salt mummification. In this study, the lower limb of a female human donor was amputated within 24 h post mortem and mummified using a process designed to simulate the salt dehydration phase of natural or artificial mummification. Skin and skeletal muscle were sampled at multiple time points over a period of 322 days and subjected to genetic analysis. Patterns of genomic fragmentation, miscoding lesions, and overall DNA degradation in both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA was assessed by different methods: gel electrophoresis, multiplex comparative autosomal STR length amplification, cloning and sequence analysis, and PCR amplification of different fragment sizes using a damage sensitive recombinant polymerase. The study outcome reveals a very good level of DNA preservation in salt mummified tissues over the course of the experiment, with an overall slower rate of DNA fragmentation in skin compared to muscle.
Highlights
Mummification is the process by which soft tissue decomposition after death is halted or significantly slowed, resulting in longterm preservation
In most forms of mummification, soft tissue is preserved when tissue dehydration slows or halts postmortem decay. This may be achieved either naturally, as a result of environmental conditions, or it may be induced by intentional human practices that result in artificial mummification
Ethics committee approval of Canton Zurich was not required for this research project, since research projects on body parts of deceased donors, who donated their bodies during their lifetime to the Institute of Anatomy, University of Zurich for research projects do not require additional approval of the ethics committee, and a letter of waiver was written to this effect
Summary
Mummification is the process by which soft tissue decomposition after death is halted or significantly slowed, resulting in longterm preservation. In most forms of mummification, soft tissue is preserved when tissue dehydration slows or halts postmortem decay. This may be achieved either naturally, as a result of environmental conditions, or it may be induced by intentional human practices that result in artificial mummification. Examples of natural mummification by desiccation are typically found in hot and arid environments, such as Egypt [3], Nubia [4], the Canary Islands [5], and sometimes in combination with cold arid plateaus, such as in northern Chile/southern Peru [6,7,8]. The burial of a body within salt deposits, as occurred during a series of cave-ins at the Chehr Abad salt mines in Iran from 500 BC to AD 500, can result in natural salt mummification [11,12,13]
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