New method of forensic examination based on human hair samples

DNA analysis is a common method for identifying someone's identity. If you are a follower of crime genre movie, you will come across the fact that forensic doctors often use DNA to determine information about victims or perpetrators. However, now scientists at Queen's University, Canada have successfully developed a new method that also produces similar results based on human hair samples . This method has a faster execution time than DNA verification but still ensures 100% accuracy.

The new, identifiable and informative method was successfully developed by chemistry professor Diane Beauchemin and her student Lily. Initially, the hair sample was washed and dried, crushed into powder and brought to burn. After that, the researchers will use electro-thermal vapor induction, plasma optical spectroscopy and multivariate analysis to analyze the evaporation products after burning hair powder.

Professor Diane is working on analyzing her own hair samples

The process allows researchers to determine the composition of sweat secreted from the hair, thereby inferring the conditions of influence such as diet, ethnicity, gender, habitat and conditions. work of hair model owner. What is special is that the whole process takes only 85 seconds to perform, much shorter than the DNA analysis method that needs to combine the use of a variety of solvents and reactants for analysis.

In laboratory experiments, the method has proven to be accurate and reliable when successfully identifying 13 hair samples from different backgrounds such as East Asia, South Asia, white people and walking. with information about their gender and identity.

Lily is preparing hair samples to conduct analysis

Although forensic scientists often get information from blood samples collected at the crime scene. However, this traditional method of encountering difficulties is that blood will quickly become dry and contaminated. Meanwhile, hair almost persists in many different environmental conditions without degradation.

The next step of the study, Professor Beauchemin intends to improve the technique, allowing it to gather a lot of information from human hair, including age and many other factors around the owner of hair samples. . The above study has been published in the past World Chemistry magazine.