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In the German podcast episode 203 of Methodisch Inkorrekt, I've learned about about new insights on fingerprint analysis of a totally new kind.
The referred paper from Nature is called "Finger sweat analysis enables short interval metabolic biomonitoring in humans".
In short, researchers were able to analyze the actual material you have left in one of your fingerprints. They are able to tell what the person has eaten recently up to the level that they are able to tell if the banana was an organic banana or not.
This opens up a whole new set of possibilities. Not only in criminal defense but also related to issues around privacy and applications in health monitoring.
Here is the abstract:
Metabolic biomonitoring in humans is typically based on the sampling of blood, plasma or urine. Although established in the clinical routine, these sampling procedures are often associated with a variety of compliance issues, which are impeding time-course studies. Here, we show that the metabolic profiling of the minute amounts of sweat sampled from fingertips addresses this challenge. Sweat sampling from fingertips is non-invasive, robust and can be accomplished repeatedly by untrained personnel. The sweat matrix represents a rich source for metabolic phenotyping. We confirm the feasibility of short interval sampling of sweat from the fingertips in time-course studies involving the consumption of coffee or the ingestion of a caffeine capsule after a fasting interval, in which we successfully monitor all known caffeine metabolites as well as endogenous metabolic responses. Fluctuations in the rate of sweat production are accounted for by mathematical modelling to reveal individual rates of caffeine uptake, metabolism and clearance. To conclude, metabotyping using sweat from fingertips combined with mathematical network modelling shows promise for broad applications in precision medicine by enabling the assessment of dynamic metabolic patterns, which may overcome the limitations of purely compositional biomarkers.