[ABO blood group typing in forensic autopsies].

In forensic science and medicine the ABO system has been a major focus, since the record of this blood system is a very prevalent one and A, B and O(H) antigens on erythrocytes are also associated with other cells and tissues throughout the body and are known to be considerably stable to the such violent conditions as heating or drying. However the determination of the ABO grouping from the body often encounters the difficulty due to haemolytic erythrocytes, and putrefaction, mummification or skeletonization of the body during post-mortem interval. In this presentation I review the merit and demerits of the ABO blood-grouping methods utilized in my division at the forensic autopsies according to the haemagglutination, absorption-elution and histochemical techniques and ABO genotyping method. It is important for ABO grouping to know the distribution of the ABO antigen in the body. I would like to emphasize that the species identification prior to ABO grouping is an important procedure because forensic materials such as from saliva, urine and seminal fluid might be contaminated with the fluid from animals, and DNA extracted from vertebrate species might be amplified with the primer for ABO genotyping and the amplified PCR products might be hybridized to those from human.