Microbial Identification
Copyright (c) 2025 Balláné Füszter Erzsébet
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Abstract
The human microbiome refers to all the microorganisms in the human body, including bacteria, viruses, fungi and other microbes that live in different parts of the body.
The diversity of bacterial communities associated with the skin is much greater than previously thought, and the composition of bacterial communities shows a high degree of variability between individuals. Numerous research findings have demonstrated that the bacterial communities on the surface of our skin are specific to the individual, so it is logical to ask whether skin bacterial residues left on objects can be used for forensic identification? Can the bacteria on the surface of an object touched by a person be compared with the bacterial community on the skin of the person who is presumed to have touched the object
Microbial profiling is a growing field of research in forensic science and as a result, the term 'microbial forensics' is increasingly used in the literature as a term for the discipline whose main task is to identify and associate individuals with objects and/or environments through the analysis of microbial characteristics (i.e. bacteria, fungi and viruses).
The use of microbiome-based forensic analysis in real-world expert cases to achieve reliable discrimination of individuals appears to be a promising tool that can be particularly useful when other identification techniques cannot provide sufficient information.
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References
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