Due to copyright issues, an electronic copy of the thesis must be ordered from the faculty. For the faculty to have time to process the order, the order must be received by the faculty at the latest 2 days before the public defence. Orders received later than 2 days before the defence will not be processed. After the public defence, please address any inquiries regarding the thesis to the candidate.
Trial Lecture – time and place
See Trial Lecture.
Adjudication committee
- First opponent: Specialist Johannes Hedman, National Forensic Centre, Swedish Police Authority
- Second opponent: Forensic Scientist Margreet van den Berge, Netherlands Forensic Institute
- Third member and chair of the evaluation committee: Professor Benedicte Alexandra Lie, University of Oslo
Chair of the Defence
Professor Lars Eide, University of Oslo
Principal Supervisor
Researcher Ane Elida Fonneløp, Oslo University Hospital
Summary
In criminal cases, forensic examination of biological traces can aid the police investigation. The challenge of providing evidence in court, however, appears to have shifted from contesting (sub-) source level propositions to contesting activity level propositions. Often, the origin of the DNA is not disputed, and the main question is about how or when the cellular material was deposited. To evaluate the evidence given activity level propositions, data from relevant transfer experiments must be available. Today, there is a lack of such data, hence, activity level reporting is prevented in many cases.
This PhD project is in the field of forensic genetics. The main aim of the project was to increase knowledge of transfer mechanisms and body fluid identification affecting activity level reporting, with focus on sexual assault cases. We investigated methods to establish a person’s propensity to deposit DNA when touching an object (“shedder test”), and recommend a handheld tube test. Furthermore, we have studied and delivered a dataset of transfer, persistence, prevalence and recovery of DNA quantity and mRNA vaginal mucosa markers in 158 samples (fingernail swabs, penile swabs and boxershorts) from 12 couples collected at different time points post intimate contact and after only social contact. We demonstrated how the data can be used to evaluate the evidence (DNA and mRNA results) given activity level propositions using Bayesian networks. In addition, we compared the performance of two mRNA profiling methods for the detection of vaginal mucosa: capillary electrophoresis (CE method) and massively parallel sequencing (MPS method). We observed a higher success rate with the CE method, suggesting that the MPS method is not yet optimized for low-level RNA casework samples.
Additional information
Contact the research support staff.