Table 1.
Chemical components in human and artificial fingerprints.
Fig 1.
Comparison of DNA yield and quality in latent and artificial fingerprints.
(A) Latent, loaded, and artificial fingerprints were deposited on two surfaces followed by DNA extraction to evaluate the total yield. (B) Comparison of DNA degradation index (DI) across fingerprint deposition on multiple surface types, where a DI ratio of greater than 1.0 indicates DNA degradation. AF (10), artificial fingerprints with 10 ng DNA; AF (5), artificial fingerprints with 5 ng DNA. Individual replicates are shown (circles) with the mean (bar) ± SD. For latent and loaded fingerprint samples, from both metal and glass, n = 6. For both types of artificial fingerprints, n = 3 for samples from glass and n = 5 for samples from metal.
Fig 2.
Comparison of protein yield and quality between latent and artificial fingerprints.
(A) Comparison of ESM pre-homogenization (pre-homog., left) or following sieve-based homogenization (post-homog., right) shows reduction in the overall skin particle size. (B) Evaluation of ESM size in deposited latent (left), loaded (middle), or artificial (right) fingerprints on glass by light microscopy. (C) Representative SDS-PAGE results from an artificial fingerprint ESM range-finding experiment to determine the corresponding protein amount in typical latent fingerprints. Arrowheads indicate prominent bands found in both latent and artificial fingerprints. (D) Protein recovery measured by a Qubit fluorometric assay between latent and artificial fingerprint samples across two surface types. The amount of protein recovered was quantified and the relative amount normalized to the surface-specific latent print average. Individual replicates (n = 3) are shown (circles) with the mean (bar) ± SD.
Table 2.
Top protein identifications by peptide spectral matches in artificial and latent fingerprint samples.
Fig 3.
Comparison of proteome composition between artificial and latent fingerprints.
(A) Protein sequence coverage (left) and number of peptides (right) detected for the fifty proteins with the highest mean sequence coverage detected in artificial or latent fingerprint samples. (B) Overlap of all proteins detected in artificial (AF) or latent (LF) fingerprint samples on metal (M) or glass (G) surfaces.
Fig 4.
Development of simple and customizable artificial fingerprints.
Artificial fingerprints developed herein incorporate both protein and DNA, making these versatile surrogates for method development of human forensic technologies focused on DNA (STR or SNP analysis) or protein (GVP analysis) markers, with the ability to be customized based on the research needs.