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.