Environmental plant DNA, a new source of evidence for difficult crime cases
Before the emergence of DNA metabarcoding technology, it is unrealistic to extract evidences from environmental DNA for forensic purpose because of high DNA cloning and sequencing costs. With the DNA metabarcoding technology, cold cases without witness, video record or human DNA become resolvable now. DNA metabarcoding powered by next generation sequencing (NGS) technology has now become a powerful approach in forensic evidence collection from environmental samples (Young et al., 2017). This study provides one more example demonstrating successful tracking of the source of mud on the suspect’s pants via diatom community. Suspect-related environmental samples including diatoms or pollen are new sources of material evidences. Special attentions should be paid to some technical aspects such as contaminations, DNA barcodes, and data processing methods when using DNA metabarcoding data as evidence.