DEPArray™ System: Key Enabling Technology for Cell Separation from Forensic Mixtures

Despite the great scientific and technological advances in recent years, mixed profiles interpretation represents a persisting challenge in forensic genetics, routinely complicating expert witness reporting in court and fostering backlogs in evidence processing worldwide. Current solutions to the complexity of mixed profiles interpretation include either the physical separation of a mixture into its biological components before genotyping (e.g., differential lysis for sperm–epithelial mixtures, laser capture microdissection, and micromanipulation) or biostatistical data analysis exploiting dedicated semicontinuous and fully continuous algorithms. Moreover, complex mixtures deriving from the contribution of the same body fluid from different individuals determine a higher level of complication since no available method allows to phenotypically distinguish the admixed biological components. DEPArray™ digital sorting technology has been reported to enable the isolation of pure single cells from forensic mixed samples also in real-casework scenarios. The advent of single-cell analysis in forensics offers a promising approach to complex mixtures interpretation enabling the identification of each contributor’s profile through the collection of multiple single cells each purely representing one single contributor to the sample.