ABSTRACT
The sheer impact deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) testing is having on the forensic sciences is reason enough for toxicologists to be aware of DNA technologies. Traditionally, DNA analysis has been beyond the purview of American forensic toxicologists as it originally developed in the biological rather than chemical or even biochemical disciplines. The birth of forensic DNA typing is generally attributed to Alec Jeffreys, who described the "DNA fingerprint" in a 1985 article in the journal Nature. Nuclear DNA testing involves multiple genetic systems which permit the multiplication of statistical chances. The first applications of DNA "fingerprinting" used probes that hybridize loosely to many different minisatellite loci simultaneously, so-called multilocus probes, which yielded very powerful multi-banded patterns resembling bar codes. The polymerase chain reaction has revolutionized DNA testing. Dot blots involve a series of DNA probes to detect specific target sequences in a given region of DNA.
