Rove beetles are early-stage visitors on corpses. They deposit their eggs on the corpse and the emerging larvae feed on fly larvae. The duration of development from egg to adult is species specific and can be used in forensics to estimate the post-mortem interval. A correct identification of all rove beetle life stages is thus important for crime investigators. This species identification can be facilitated by DNA barcoding, provided that a reliable reference library is available.

At present, the forensically important species of Western Europe are not, or only poorly, represented in public sequence databases. To remediate this gap, this project aims at constructing a reference library for 48 rove beetles species of forensic importance found in Belgium, by DNA barcoding voucher material from the collections of the RBINS and the University of Liège (Gembloux), previously identified by expert entomologists.

This new dataset of reference DNA barcodes can be queried to identify all different life stages of rove beetles collected by forensic investigators to help in their legal cases. Depending on the beetle species and the stage of development encountered, investigators can estimate the post-mortem interval or even to reveal if corpse were transported.

Publications & presentations

Partners & collaborators