In a new, and slightly scary advancement in technology, fingerprints found at crime scenes can identify unique individual characteristics about a person, including whether the suspect is a smoker, uses drugs, or likes a particular perfume.  Forensic scientists believe that this new information will help in eliminating suspects quicker, as well as narrowing the field of potential criminals at a crime scene.

Fingerprints contain a mixture of skin cells, sweat secretions and substances picked up from elsewhere. Careful analysis can show whether a person may have handled drugs or explosives, but the new tools make it possible to determine a person’s habits from the secretions in their prints as well.

It also appears that the amount of fat in a person’s body could be detected as well.

“It seems people differ in the amount they secrete of the different kinds of lipid,” Jickells says. “The differences aren’t great enough to be able to identify someone specifically, but you could definitely rule out suspects if you found they had produced a lot of one lipid, in contrast to a print at the crime scene.”

The new technique exploits metabolites left in sweat on a person’s fingerprint ridges by using gold nanoparticles.  The new identification method can be used as a quick method in the field, instead of waiting weeks for results to return from the labs.  David Russell, who invented the technique, hopes to modify it to be used in the field, with a portable detector, to find quicker responses to potential outbreaks of diseases, such as avian flu.