DNA profiling of saliva traces habitually deposited on various documents: a pilot study
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Egyptian Journal of Forensic Sciences
(2020) 10:14
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Open Access
DNA profiling of saliva traces habitually deposited on various documents: a pilot study Mukesh Kumar Thakar1, Vivek Sahajpal2* , Amandeep Kaur Bhambara1, Deepika Bhandari2 and Arun Sharma2
Abstract Background: A study was conducted to determine whether the habitualness among individuals to apply saliva to their fingertips (for moistening) while shuffling through pages of a document can provide evidence in cases pertaining to handling of documents in forensic investigations. It involved 200 volunteers, 50% of which were male and 50% were female. The volunteers shuffled the pages of the three substrates (registers, books and magazines). An attempt was made to detect the transfer of saliva onto the substrate while shuffling and generation of DNA profiles from the transferred saliva. The presence of salivary stains was confirmed using iodine fuming test and starch iodine test. Afterwards, the DNA was recovered with substrate cutting method, extracted using QIAGEN® QIAmp DNA mini kit and amplified using the Power Plex® 21 System Kit. Results: The results revealed that 83% of individuals applied saliva onto the documents and majority of females applied saliva. DNA could be successfully recovered from the stains detected on the three substrates, and complete STR profiles could be generated. Main finding: A conclusion can be drawn out that majority of subjects under study were in habit of using saliva to turn pages, and this can be an important evidence to help criminal justice system as DNA profiles could be developed successfully from the substrates. This can be a very good evidence in respect of identifying the individual(s) who handled the document. Keywords: Paper, Saliva, Habitual, Document, DNA profiling
Introduction Documents are commonly encountered in criminal cases (Wickenheiser 2002). Many people moisten their fingers with saliva when flicking pages. Taking this into account, a research experiment was designed to take advantage of this behavior to potentially establish the handler of a document. DNA recovery from paper has improved over time. It is now possible to generate full DNA profiles from even small number of cells left on the scene of occurrence (Wickenheiser 2002). Some authors found DNA profiles from touched documents including ordinary office paper (Balogh et al. 2003) and also from paper * Correspondence: [email protected] 2 Directorate of Forensics Services, Himachal Pradesh, India Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
substrates of varying weights (Plaza et al. 2015). Previous work on documents was related to touch DNA (Meakin and Jamieson 2013; Sewell et al. 2008), and the present study was concerned with the determination of the habit of using saliva and to how much extent it can help in investigations. The main goal of the study is to determine whether saliva stains are likely to yield DNA profiles from the various paper substrates.
Materials and methods Sample collecti
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