Baby Tooth Helps Solve Death Mystery

A team of Perth scientists, including Professor David Ravine, from WAIMR's Laboratory for Molecular Genetics, have used a keepsake baby tooth to help a Queensland couple solve the mystery of their 7-year-old daughter's death - 14 years after she died.

The researchers carried out a gene test on DNA extracted from the baby tooth which the girl's mother had kept, and were able to finally establish that the little girl had died from the devastating neurological disorder, Rett Syndrome. A paper outlining the effort was published in the prestigious international medical journal, The Lancet. The diagnosis helped the family to understand what had happened to their daughter and erased years of worry about the cause of her death. It also removed fears about the risk to any future children the family's son may father.

While extracting DNA from unconventional sources such as teeth is common in forensic medicine, it is rare to use this sort of technique in genetic counselling situations.