Determination of a criminal suspect using environmental plant DNA metabarcoding technology

Abstract

Background: There are criminal cases that no frequently used evidence, for example, DNAs from the criminal, is available. Such cases usually are unresolvable. With the advent of DNA metabarcoding, evidences are mined from environmental DNA and such cases become resolvable. This study reports how a criminal suspect was determined by environmental plant DNA metabarcoding technology. A girl was killed in a rural wet area in China without a witness or video record. Pants with dried mud was found from one of her boyfriend's house. The mud was removed from the pants and 11 more mud or soil samples surrounding murder scene were collected. DNA was extracted from the soil. Chloroplast rbcL gene fragments were ampli ed and sequenced on a next generation sequencing platform.Results: After bioinformatics analysis, of the 2980 ZOTUs in total obtained from the 12 samples, 1495 ZOTUs were identi ed to species, genera or families based on the existing public database. The feast analysis based on either taxa or taxa plus abundance data demonstrated that the mud on the suspect's pants was from the criminal scene.Conclusions: The suspect nally made a clean breast of his crime. This case implies that plant DNA in the environment soil is a new source of evidence in determination of suspects using DNA metabarcoding technology and has high potentials of extensive applications in criminal cases.

What determines plant species diversity along the Modern Silk Road in the east?

“…DNA metabarcoding of environmental samples has been used in paleobiodiversity reconstruction [ 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 ], modern biodiversity assessment [ 12 , 13 ], biological monitoring [ 14 ], invasive species assessment [ 11 ], animal feeding habit assessment [ 15 ], plant and microorganism interaction research [ 16 ], and forensic evidence analysis [ 17 ]. While some review articles mention using environmental samples for plant diversity research, eDNA has not yet been extensively used to study plant species diversity on a large geographical scale.…”

Using habitat suitability models for multiscale forensic geolocation analysis

“…One can explain this paucity of examples by a shortage of skilled forensic ecologists and palynologists, a lack of efficient and accurate forensic sampling, and capacity issues with informatics pipelines capable of analyzing these data (Bryant, 2013). Further, recent advances in DNA metabarcoding could make pollen identification faster and easier, facilitating analysis for forensic needs (Bell et al, 2022; Liu et al, 2021). Geographic attribution (GA) is the next step after identifying recovered trace materials, where investigators must decide on potential areas/locations to search (Kim Rossmo, 1999; Stern et al, 2019).…”