Clinical Trials

In the event of chemical and nuclear explosions, sudden accidents, natural disasters, and ethnic studies, the first priority in the identification process of a person by forensic investigators is determination of an individual's sexual identity (Laverde 2013, Ramakrishnan et al. 2015). Human sex (or gender) determination is important in criminal investigations of missing persons, and in archeology and anthropology for the exploration of gender differences in past populations and for the study of cultures and human activities (Laverde 2013, Faerman et al. 1995, Masuyama et al. 2017). Human sex (or gender) determination is also a part and an essential priority of forensic odontology when it is impossible to traditionnally identify the deceased (Chowdhury et al. 2018). Human sex determination can help when seeking sexual assault evidence as it can serve as confirmation that the "sperm fraction" extracted from swabs and stains do contain male DNA. In this regard, it can also serve as an indicator of the amount of male DNA present in the non-sperm fraction (Reynolds and Varlaro 1996). Ornoy et al. (2019) believe that human gender assessment is crucial when the proper definition of the sex is of diagnostic and/or therapeutic importance such as the cases of ambiguous genitalia and intersex. In criminal investigations, determining sex based on morphology (of the tooth, skull, and other soft tissues in the oral and sub-lumbar region) is very difficult or even impossible in many cases. Sex determination of forensic and archeological samples which lack morphological diagnostic characteristics, such as fragmentary bones and body fluid samples, is also not applicable using morphology (Masuyama et al. 2017).