What is it about?
Being able to determine the geographic location of a soil sample could be a powerful forensic tool. This paper lays the groundwork needed to develop the databases of soil variability required to make forensic soil profiling feasible. Often soil samples are found in investigations, such as on boots of suspects. If those soil samples could be placed to a site of origin, it might track the travels of the suspect,. Linking soils to their site of origin requires bioinformatic approaches to determine provenance, which we have started to do in this work.
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Why is it important?
There are many settings in which being able to determine where a suspect has been, or to link a suspect to a place is essential. Soil samples can help do this, with the tools we have developed here.
Perspectives
We have used tools available in many crime labs, such as fragment analysis, rather than more powerful but less widespread next generation sequencing technologies. This is to make these approaches feasible for the greatest number of users.
Professor Eric von Wettberg
University of Vermont
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Bioinformatics Approach to Assess the Biogeographical Patterns of Soil Communities: The Utility for Soil Provenance, , Journal of Forensic Sciences, January 2018, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/1556-4029.13741.
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