A Wildlife Forensic Study for the Species Identification of Indian Blackbuck Through Forensically Informative Nucleotide Sequencing (FINS)

Vikas Kumar¹, Neelkamal Sharma¹, Kusum Singal¹ and Arun Sharma²

¹Department of Genetics (Forensic Science), Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak Haryana, India.

²Directorate of Forensic Science, Himachal Pradesh, Shimla Hills, Junga.

Corresponding Author E-mail: neelforensics@gmail.com

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.13005/bbra/2621

ABSTRACT: Identification of exhibits obtained in wildlife cases usually presents challenging tasks for the forensic science investigators. This study describes a casework, where a degraded tissue sample was recovered from pathology department LUVAS University Hisar, Haryana to resolve the identity of the questioned sample. The mitochondrial DNA region of the questioned sample was amplified and sequenced using universal primers of cytochrome b gene to determine the forensically informative nucleotide sites to find the species identity. The obtained sequencing results were compared with the most homologous sequences extracting from NCBI-GenBank database and a phylogenetic tree was done with the aligned sequences to determine the species identity with strong bootstrap support. The informative sites generated revealed that the degree of sequence similarity showed maximum homology (100%) with the sequence obtained from the database. Based on the FINS analysis the recovered sample related to Antilope cervicapra (family Bovidae).

KEYWORDS: Blackbuck Cytochrome b;  Forensic Science;FINS;NCBI; Phylogenetic; Wildlife;

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