Senior Lecturer in Forensic Science, Dr Sarah Fieldhouse, has written a piece for The Conversation about discovering a way to recover DNA from fingerprints without destroying them.

“Fingerprints hold a lot more information than you might realise. They don’t just provide a pattern with which to identify people. They can also contain DNA. And as neither DNA nor fingerprints are infallible ways of working out who was at a location, combining both pieces of evidence could be vital for investigators.

The problem is that forensic scientists usually have to choose between one or the other, as recovering DNA can mean destroying the fingerprint and vice versa. However, my colleagues and I have discovered a new method that could collect both types of evidence at once.” Read the full article here.