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Environment - Dust Metabarcoding
Assessing the potential to use biological and chemical properties of the airborne fraction of soil for provenance assignment and forensic casework
The airborne fraction of soil (dust) is both ubiquitous in nature and contains localised biological and chemical signatures, making it a potential medium for forensic intelligence. Metabarcoding of dust can yield biological communities unique to the site of interest, similarly, geochemical analyses can uncover elements and minerals within dust that can be matched to a geographic location. Combining these analyses presents multiple lines of evidence as to the origin of dust collected from items of interest. Dr. Jennifer Young is a DNA forensic technology research associate who lead a team where environmental dust samples were collected from belongings to determine whether bacterial and fungal communities in dust.
Dust and soil were collected from three sites with differing soil properties across South Australia. The resulting ITS and 16S sequencing data, generated at the SAGC, showed that it was possible to perform analysis from a single swabbed sample and that there were unique biological and chemical signatures between sites. When modelling bacterial and fungal diversity, Dr. Jennifer Young and team found samples were correctly predicted using dust 67% and 56% of the time and using soil 56% and 22% of the time for bacteria and fungi communities respectively. This proof-of-concept study found that metabarcoding of dust samples can generate bacteria and fungi community profiles that are unique to sites. While there is still a long way to go in this field, both metabarcoding and biogeochemical analyses of dust samples show potential for applications in forensic science.