The sampling of touch DNA from paper documents is often achieved by simply excising pieces of the document. This generates high-quality DNA profiles but also damages evidence; thus, we investigated non-destructive sampling of paper documents for touch DNA. Exploratory and confirmatory studies were performed to identify a non-destructive technique that generated excision-comparable STR profiles. Sampling with adhesive portions of sticky notes performed well in the initial exploratory study: in the confirmatory study this adhesive-based technique generated profiles of comparable completeness to conventional excision, with no significant difference in profile completeness found between the two. The sticky-note technique performs comparably to excision in generating STR profiles from paper, whilst preserving exhibit integrity.
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