Non-destructive means of sampling paper documents for generation of STR profiles

Abstract

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.