Sarah Glenn and Dr. Godfrey
Fingerprints play a large role in identifying suspects in criminal cases. Due to the variability of ridge formation and the minute details used in fingerprint comparison the odds of having identical fingerprints as someone else is about one in one billion. For decades fingerprints have been limited to a comparative identification source is crime labs, meaning putting fingerprints side by side and finding if there are differences in the ridge patterns. While comparative identification has an important role in the forensic world, far more can be done with fingerprints to give an analyst more information about the individual the fingerprint came from.
Recent studies have shown that fingerprints contain a wealth of chemical information that could give investigators valuable information ranging from recent drug use to traces of explosives. The purpose of this study was to show proof of concept that drug metabolites can be detected from the fingerprints of a suspect. The drug analyzed in this study was caffeine as a body will sweat out caffeine like any other drug and it will become present in the form of sweat that creates a fingerprint after the body has metabolized it.
Fingerprints along with sweat and saliva were collected from volunteers and analyzed using matrix assisted laser desorption ionization (MALDI) to look for caffeine present. Initial results show that MALDI was able to detect caffeine in fingerprints for up to 2-5 hours after consumption, which leads analysts to try to optimize these methods to facilitate illicit drug detection in fingerprints.