Detritus: An approach to extracting useful information from complex mixtures that include human DNA

Abstract This is a study of quality and utility of the products of arbitrarily primed PCR amplifications. The main finding is that the fidelity of arbitrarily primed amplifications of the type we have used for soils is good and the sequences are satisfactory for species identification, at least for the human genome and, by inference, for other genomes. This type of amplification of DNA samples from human tissues results in a population of sequences from locations distributed across the human genome. Base composition and CG/GC ratio in the amplimers differs from that of the whole genome to a degree similar to that of subsets of sequences in the human genome reported by Karlin S. and Burge (1). It is possible that further work on arbitrarily primed amplifications may enable individualisation of human DNA in detritus and soils.