Natural mummification can occur under a variety conditions. This may be achieved either naturally, as a result of environmental conditions, or it may be induced by intentional human practices that result in artificial mummification. In most forms of mummification, soft tissue is preserved when tissue dehydration slows or halts postmortem decay.
From a medical perspective, mummies enable the origins and evolution of human disease to be studied directly, thereby making them a unique reservoir of information about the human past. Mummification is the process by which soft tissue decomposition after death is halted or significantly slowed, resulting in long-term preservation.
#Natron salt used in mummification process skin
The study outcome reveals a very good level of DNA preservation in salt mummified tissues over the course of the experiment, with an overall slower rate of DNA fragmentation in skin compared to muscle. Patterns of genomic fragmentation, miscoding lesions, and overall DNA degradation in both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA was assessed by different methods: gel electrophoresis, multiplex comparative autosomal STR length amplification, cloning and sequence analysis, and PCR amplification of different fragment sizes using a damage sensitive recombinant polymerase. Skin and skeletal muscle were sampled at multiple time points over a period of 322 days and subjected to genetic analysis. In this study, the lower limb of a female human donor was amputated within 24 h post mortem and mummified using a process designed to simulate the salt dehydration phase of natural or artificial mummification. The aim of this study was to analyse post mortem DNA alterations in soft tissues in order to improve our knowledge of the patterns of DNA degradation that occur during salt mummification. Mummified human tissues are of great interest in forensics and biomolecular archaeology.
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