Initial testing of an applicator prototype to facilitate forensic DNA recovery by tapelifting

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ABSTRACT

A tapelift used for DNA recovery can be prone to user contamination due to excessive handling when applying it to a surface and placing it into an extraction tube. Here, we present initial results from testing our newly developed applicator with tapelifts compared against the manual tapelift method. With subsequent testing of its performance across various surface types and casework scenarios, it is hoped that this applicator will revolutionize the way tapelifts are used to collect DNA at crime scenes.

KEYWORDS:

• DNA recovery
• DNA collection
• tapelifts
• crime scene

Acknowledgments

We thank the Department of Defence for funding this project (ID11383) and the volunteers for their participation, which was approved by the UTS Human Research Ethics Committee (#ETH22-7449).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Government [Department of Defence ID11383].