Bone natural autofluorescence and confocal laser scanning microscopy: Preliminary results of a novel useful tool to distinguish between forensic and ancient human skeletal remains

Narrowband-autofluorescence imaging for bone analysis

“…As it can be seen, all these features present an intensity peak at an excitation-and emissionwavelength combination of 340 nm / 390 nm. This peak corresponds well with the collagen content since most of the organic component of bone possess collagen type I [27][28][29]35]. However, the intensity slopes are more abrupt for some features than others are.…”

“…In the fluorescent images, an additional thin border lining the lacuna was observed. It has been proposed that the lining could be the structures of the osteocyte sheath [35]. In the necrotic specimen, the lacunar de-vitality increases [45].…”

“…However, these methods require a point-scanning of the bone sample to obtain an image, which can be time consuming [33,34]. The time consuming is reduced in the methods acquiring few autofluorescence images of bone without scanning the sample [35,36]. The existing methods use filters and monochrome or RGB camera to obtain enhanced bone features image in fast way.…”

Diagnodent and VistaCam may be unsuitable for the evaluation of dental caries in archeological teeth

“…The structure of the biogenic apatite changes as the concentration of Fe, Mn, Si, Al, Ba, and Cu increases (Kohn, Schoeninger, & Barker, ). Diagenesis changes the fluorescence of excavated remains (Capasso, D'Anastasio, Guarnieri, Viciano, & Mariggiò, ; Maggiano, Dupras, Schultz, & Biggerstaff, ), which can directly disturb the readouts. Moreover, a 2‐year storage of contemporary carious teeth in a chloramine, formalin or thymol solution results in the decrease of porphyrin‐based fluorescence (Francescut, Zimmerli, & Lussi, ).…”

Fluorescence screening of collagen preservation in tooth dentine

“…Collagen contains several fluorogenic compounds and shows autofluorescence when excited with ultraviolet (UV) light at ~370 nm wavelength, with emission in the blue spectrum at 405-450 nm (Georgakoudi 2002;Lakowicz 2006). Albeit the chemical nature of autofluorescence in human bone and teeth is still not completely understood, fluorescence is apparently triggered by the organic phase, independent from the mineralized phase (Capasso et al 2017). Autofluorescence in collagen is presumably elicited by cross-links (Armstrong & Horsley 1972), also aromatic amino acids such as hydroxylysine and tyrosine, or glycyl-aspartic acid and glycyl-serine that display emission near the collagen fluorescence peak (Perry & Hefferren 1973;Eyre et al 1984;Fujimori 1989).…”