A selective set of DNA-methylation markers for age determination of blood, teeth and buccal samples

Anthropologic age estimation techniques are currently limited to teeth and bones and have significantly lowered accuracy when used for adult age estimation. We recently developed an epigenetic age estimation assay as an alternative forensic technique in which prediction models provided highly accurate age predictions for blood and dentin samples. Other matrices such as buccal swabs are equally relevant in forensic investigations. We demonstrate that the same set of 4 genes which we previously used for age determination of blood and dentin provides highly accurate age prediction results for buccal swabs too. A quadratic regression using DNA methylation values of specific CpG sites within the genes APSA, PDE4C, EDARADD and ELOVL2 provided age estimation accuracies with a Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD) value of 3.32 years for 50 buccal swabs.