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Updated: Jul 12, 2026
Accuracy in Dental Medicine, A New Way to Measure Trueness and Precision
Published on: April 29, 2014
An evaluation of DNA yield, DNA quality and bite registration from a dental impression wafer
Mark A Ellis1, Fengyu Song, Edwin T Parks
1Department of Pediatric Dentistry, Indiana University School of Dentistry, 1121 W. Michigan Street, Indianapolis, IN 46202, USA.
Background:
The authors determined the amount and quality of the DNA captured by a bite impression wafer and analyzed any inaccuracies in the impression wafer.
Methods:
The authors made bite registrations for subjects aged 7 to 12 years by using a dental impression wafer (Toothprints, Kerr, Orange, Calif.), obtained an oral rinse sample, took cheek cells by using buccal swabs and made an alginate impression to pour a stone model. They extracted and quantified the DNA from the dental impression wafer, mouthwash and buccal swabs by using the Quant-iT PicoGreen (Invitrogen, Carlsbad, Calif.) assay and a real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) assay. They compared the stone models and imprints from the wafer.
Results:
The average amounts of DNA determined by using Quant-iT PicoGreen from the buccal swab, mouthwash and dental impression wafer samples were 113.61, 509.57 and 1.03 micrograms, respectively. The average amounts of DNA determined by using RT-PCR from the buccal swab, mouthwash and dental impression wafer samples were 11.5240, 22.2540 and 0.0279 mug, respectively. The bite registrations and stone models had an average of 14 percent of mismatches.
Conclusion:
The dental impression wafers captured DNA but not in high quantities. They did not produce an accurate representation of the dentition.
Clinical Implications:
The dental impression wafers captured enough DNA to permit amplification. The accuracy of the bite registration was not sufficient for identification purposes. Therefore, dental impression wafers may be useful only as a reservoir for DNA.
