Seeds,the reproductive organs of plants,are common as trace evidence from crime scenes.Seed evidence could be grouped into several categories based on the types of crimes they are associated with,including child abuse...Seeds,the reproductive organs of plants,are common as trace evidence from crime scenes.Seed evidence could be grouped into several categories based on the types of crimes they are associated with,including child abuse,homicides and drugs.Most commonly,seeds are examined microscopically and identified to the plant species level to show a linkage between persons and places.More recently,forensic researchers have evaluated the poten-tial for extracting and typing DNA from seeds to further individualize the samples.As a model system,tomato seeds were examined microscopically after different cooking treat-ments and assessed for the potential to DNA type seeds for variety identification.A sufficient quantity and quality of DNA were recovered from uncooked,digested and undigested tomato seeds for amplified fragment length polymorphism(AFLP)analysis;however,any form of cooking destroyed the seed DNA.A simple microscopic analysis was able to distin-guish between a cooked tomato seed versus an uncooked seed.This article is intended to provide an overview of case examples and current techniques for the forensic examination of seeds as plant-derived evidence.展开更多
基金This research supplies was funded by The National Institute of Justice(NIJ)[grant number 2001-IJ-CX-K011]the University of New Haven and the Henry C.Lee Forensic Science Institute.The scholarship for Dr.Cheng-Lung Lee was supported by the education authority of Taiwan.
文摘Seeds,the reproductive organs of plants,are common as trace evidence from crime scenes.Seed evidence could be grouped into several categories based on the types of crimes they are associated with,including child abuse,homicides and drugs.Most commonly,seeds are examined microscopically and identified to the plant species level to show a linkage between persons and places.More recently,forensic researchers have evaluated the poten-tial for extracting and typing DNA from seeds to further individualize the samples.As a model system,tomato seeds were examined microscopically after different cooking treat-ments and assessed for the potential to DNA type seeds for variety identification.A sufficient quantity and quality of DNA were recovered from uncooked,digested and undigested tomato seeds for amplified fragment length polymorphism(AFLP)analysis;however,any form of cooking destroyed the seed DNA.A simple microscopic analysis was able to distin-guish between a cooked tomato seed versus an uncooked seed.This article is intended to provide an overview of case examples and current techniques for the forensic examination of seeds as plant-derived evidence.
