Molecular Technique for Gender Identification: A Boon in Forensic Odontology

Identification of an individual is essential both for legal and humanitarian purpose. Gender identification is an essential criteria required to establish identity of an individual. Use of molecular technique in forensic odontology is an emerging field and widens the avenue even in challenging cases of identification. Gender determination using molecular techniques in forensic odontology shows prodigious outcome and hence befitted as frontier in forensic odontology. Identification of an individual in mass disaster and crime investigation cases in current scenario is an ardent but highly desirable task. Thorough knowledge of forensic genetics is essential and is the need of the hour. Recent advancements in molecular technique for DNA typing useful in gender determination are both economical and time savers. These advancements will bring justice to people and large benefit to the society. An exhaustive internet based literature search was carried out in pubmed and google scholar database using terms ‘gender identification’ OR ‘Individual identification’ AND ‘DNA fingerprinting’. The search yielded 1848 articles. Inclusion criteria included relevance to the context decided by reading the abstract and availability of full text. A total of 169 articles were selected. Further on reading the full texts, only article pertaining to oral cavity along with relevant articles from the references of the selected articles were considered. A total of 90 articles were considered in the final review. The current paper aims to comprehensively review the gender determination molecular techniques useful in forensic odontology. It emphasizes on various sources, techniques, profiling systems and genes employed for gender identification from oral cavity.