Careful criminals usually clean a scene, wiping away visible blood and fingerprintsFingerprint, impression made by the papillary ridges on the ends of the fingers and thumbs. Fingerprints afford an infallible means of personal identification, because the ridge arrangement on every finger of every human being is unique.... However, prints made with trace amounts of blood, invisible to the naked eye, could remain. When violent crimes are committed, a culprit’s fingerprints inked in blood can be hard to see, especially if they tried to clean the scene. So, Li-Juan Fan, Rongliang Ma and colleagues wanted to find a simple way to bind a fluorescent polymer to blood proteins so that they could detect clear fingerprints on many different surfaces.
The researchers modified a yellow-green fluorescent polymer they had previously developed by adding a second amino group, which allowed stable bonds to form between the polymer and blood serum albumin proteins. They dissolved the polymer and absorbed it into a cotton pad, which was placed on top of prints made with chicken blood on various surfaces, such as aluminum foil, multicolored plastic and painted wood. All of the surfaces showed high contrast between the blood and background under blue-violet light and revealed details, including ridge endings, short ridges, whorls and sweat pores. In another set of experiments, a piece of human DNADNA, or Deoxyribonucleic Acid, is the genetic material found in cells, composed of a double helix structure. It serves as the genetic blueprint for all living organisms. remained intact after being mixed with the polymer, suggesting that any genetic material found after processing a print could still be analyzed to further identify a suspect, the researchers say.
Source: American Chemical society
Journal Reference:
- Zhinan Fan, Chi Zhang, Jiajun Chen, Rongliang Ma, Yaoqi Lu, Jia-Wei Wu, Li-Juan Fan. Highly Stable, Nondestructive, and Simple Visualization of Latent Blood Fingerprints Based on Covalent Bonding Between the Fluorescent Conjugated Polymer and Proteins in Blood. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 2021; 13 (13): 15621 DOI: 10.1021/acsami.1c00710
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