Malignant tumors and forensics--dilemmas and proposals.

Aim: To evaluate the effect of genetic instability and degradation in archived histology samples from cancerous tumors and to investigate the validity of short tandem repeat (STR) typing of these samples and its potential effect on human identification.

Methods: Two hundred and twenty eight slides of archival pathology tissues from 13 different types of malignant tumors were compared with healthy tissues from the same individuals. DNA analysis was performed using standard techniques for forensic STR analysis, PowerPlex16 and Identifiler on 2 distinct sample sets.